 So welcome everyone and welcome Michael Goldberg. Thank you for joining us virtually this evening at the San Francisco Public Library. In this presentation, Michael Goldberg will talk about his life as a rock and roll journalist and share photos he took of Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Patty Smith, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Towns Van Zant, Van Morrison, Frank Zappa, The Sex Pistols and others. He will read excerpts from profiles and essays on Bob Dylan, James Brown's visit to San Quentin, Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Patty Smith and more. The library hosts hundreds of free programs a month system wide. In the chat, we'll post San Francisco Public Library's upcoming events link so you all know it's happening soon at your favorite library. We'll also post our YouTube channel link where you can watch past outstanding library programs. And if you don't already have a San Francisco Public Library card, you may obtain one at any branch or main. Here's everything you need to know on how to obtain an S.F.P.L. card. I'm dropping that link in the chat now. Land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramay Tushaloni peoples who are the original habitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their solvent rights as first peoples and wish to pay respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramay Tush community. For more information on S.F.P.L.'s Ramay Tushaloni land acknowledgement, please see the link posted in the chat. This program has been sponsored by the Friends of the Library and brought to you by Art, Music and Recreation Center of the San Francisco Public Library. You can visit us at the main library, fourth floor, and may contact us at the email and our phone number provided here. We'll drop our homepage link in the chat. Listed here are titles and websites by Michael Goldberg that can be found at S.F.P.L. or beyond. Visit any reference desk and a librarian will help connect you or visit your local bookstore. Michael Goldberg is an American novelist, journalist, animal rights activist and pioneering digital music entrepreneur. He is known for his work at Rolling Stone where he was first a senior writer and later West Coast editor and for envisioning and co-founding the first web music magazine, Addicted to Noise, in 1994. From 2014 to 2016, Goldberg published the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, which are 1970s coming-of-age novels and worked actively on animal rights causes. Nonfiction books, Wicked Game, The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Walsy was published in June of 2022 and Addicted to Noise, the music writings of Michael Goldberg was published in 2023. A book of his music photographs, Jukebox will be published in May 2024. Lastly, the rules. All participants will remain muted during the presentation. 10 to 15 minutes will be reserved at the end of the presentation for Michael to answer questions that are posted in the Q&A. So library related or other, please use the chat. This presentation will be recorded. We have enabled auto transcription. If you need closed captioning on your screen, you can remove it from your screen by clicking the CC button. So welcome Michael and thank you for being here. I'll stop sharing my screen now. Great, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Let's see, I'm hoping people will use the gallery view because that way they'll be able to see me as well as what I'm gonna put up on the screen because I'm gonna be sharing my screen or yeah, through this. So just for those of you who are unfamiliar with Addicted to Noise, this was the second virtual cover of Addicted to Noise February 1995. So I've been writing about musicians and rock and roll since the late 60s when I was in high school and I've been photographing musicians since I was 13 and took shots with my Kodak Brownie camera at the world's first rock festival, the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival which was held on Mount Tamalpais in Bill Valley on June 10th and 11th, 1967, less than a week before the much better known Monterey Pop Festival. It was there that I photographed Janice Joplin and Sam Andrew from Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jim Morrison and Ray Menzarek of the Doors. I had already become obsessed with rock and roll beginning when I was 12 and saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I think it helped that my father had been in Kaiser Hospital for a week and shared a room with a man who had his radio turned to top 40 radio for that entire week. My father absolutely hated rock and roll. In the late 60s, dance concerts were held by some of the original hippies slash members of the San Francisco counterculture who called themselves the family dog. They were held at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco at the corner of Sutter and Van S. To get the word out about the concerts, a handful of talented artists, Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly created psychedelic posters. That's one by Moscoso. In Marin, the man, one of my friends and I called the poster guy would come to Sausalito each week and get store owners to put a poster in their window and a pile of hand bills on the counter next to the register. I would get my mom to drive my friend and I to Sausalito each week and we would put our names on the back of a couple of posters so that we could come back the following week after the show they were advertising was over and get them to put up and put on our walls. So in late 1967, I was in Sausalito and we went into the Tides bookstore and there was a pile of the first issue of Rolling Stone. It cost 25 cents. It was devoted to covering rock music of course. John Lennon was on the cover. I stood there and looked through the entire issue. I immediately became a subscriber. It was this newspaper format then published every other week and it was the Bible of rock and roll and I eagerly awaited each issue. From early on, I loved magazines. I was already subscribing to Ramparts which featured Bob Dylan on its cover in March of 1966. Back then I thought magazines were their own world. In magazines like Ramparts and The New Yorker which my parents subscribed to and which I read there was the table of contents letting you know what was in store. Sometimes there was one page intro by the editor letting you in on some key info from the issue. A front book section before you got to the features and then there might be a review section. You got to know the bylines and I would become a fan of certain writers. Peter Marcus, Dave Mark, Lester Bangs, Robert Duncan, Chuck Young. Soon after the first issue of Rolling Stone was published, I knew I was gonna write about rock music. I wanted into that rock and roll world I was reading about and it seemed like the guys, it was mostly guys at the time, writing at Rolling Stone had access to that world and I wanted to write. I wanted to share my perspective on music and musicians with others who love music and I wanted to be the best writer I could so that I could adequately communicate what I saw and heard and felt and experienced. At 16, during the summer of 1970, before my junior year, with some friends using money I'd saved over the years, I published one issue of a Bay Area rock magazine we called Hard Road after an album by the British blues man, John Mayo. The cover story was an interview with Jerry Garcia. I had met Garcia on Mount Tamalpias at the top of the driveway that led down to my friend, Tom Donahue Jr.'s house. And yes, Tom Donahue Jr. was the son of Tom Big Daddy Donahue, the man who created the first underground free forum rock radio station, which was KMPX and later ran KSAN at San Francisco. And when I asked Garcia if he would let me and my hard road co-founder interview him, he said yes and amazingly, he gave us the address of his house in Larkspur. When we got there the following week, at about 7 p.m. or so, I was carrying a two or so by three foot meal-to-reel tape recorder. They were not portable tape recorders then. You had to use a reel-to-reel if you wanted to record. And then we had a microphone and I had my 35 millimeter Pentex camera and Mountain Girl, Garcia's girlfriend at the time, later they were married, answered the door and looked dubiously at three 16-year-olds. What did we want? When I told her Garcia had told us to come to the house to interview him, she looked confused and told us he was about to leave for a gig in Berkeley. He had forgotten, but we were still invited in and we interviewed him in his living room for a half hour or so. That interview with Jerry Garcia, and I took these photos of him at his house that evening and the live photos, I'm gonna show you of him and other members of the Grateful Dead around the same time. So I'll show you these real quick. That's Mountain Girl to Jerry's right. This is Jerry Garcia playing with new writers in the Purple Sage in 1970. Phil Lesch playing at a ballroom in San Rafael that was called before you at the time that they played there. Pig Pan, same gig, Jerry at his house. So after the interview, I'm sorry, at that time the sixties weren't really over yet. Young people, myself included, really thought a revolution was at hand, that the values of the counterculture would replace those of the quote unquote establishment. One of us asked Jerry Garcia this question, do you agree with some of the people that rock music is a manifestation of revolution? It isn't that to me, he said, but I could see that someone could think that it is, yeah. I agree that there are people that say that, yeah. Well, I think that the whole thing about what revolutions are is all completely different. I mean, the unfortunate thing about the revolution that's going on now is that there's a lot of people that are still sticking to like an old line revolutionary tap which has been shown to be a miserable failure. And it's like, I think that the revolution that's going to make some sort of dent or some change is already over. It's already happened in principle and the waves of it are now moving away from ground zero at the rate of about, you know, a mile every four years and he chuckled or something like that. You know, it's going real slow, but eventually the whole world will be a different place. As a result of things that have already happened, it's already gone, it's already passed. And the rest of it is like telling everybody who missed it that it's already happened. A friend of mine says that it's a cleanup action, a mock-up action, and I'm inclined to agree with that. What Garcia was saying was that a philosophical change had occurred in the mid sixties. And some people understood that, got it when it happened and were living their lives with different values, values of love and empathy and community, not consumerism, everybody for themselves and the almighty dollar rules. Valuing creativity and staying true to one's beliefs rather than pursuing money as the fiala end all. Or at least that's how I interpreted what he said. I thought music, art, writing, film and photography were the most important things in the world. And for me, writing and photography were what gave my life meaning. Maybe what Garcia said that day helped me pursue what mattered to me. Writing about music and musicians and photographing them at a time when almost no one thought you could make a living as a rock critic. Certainly not my dad who wanted me to have the all important quote backup plan. I now believe that if I had wasted my time on the backup plan, I would never have succeeded as a music journalist. While attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, beginning in the fall of 1971, I wrote reviews for the college paper City on a Hill Press and soon wrote features and reviews for the local Santa Cruz underground paper, Sundays. I broke into the quote unquote big time in 1975 when I was 22. I was a copy boy at the San Francisco Chronicle. So I knew Chronicle art critic Tom Albright. I also knew Paul Krasner, editor of The Realist and ghost writer for Lenny Bruce's autobiography whom I had interviewed for Sundays and who in 1973 had lived down a dirt road from me just above the beach between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. In 1975, my then girlfriend and soon to be wife, Leslie Robinson, and I went to a show by the Great New Orleans Combo, The Meters at a club called The Boarding House in San Francisco. I took photos of the meters and afterward I spoke to their manager, Harry Doepin and got his phone number and his address so I could send them some photos. It turned out that the bank is going to return to the Bay Area and I got it into my head that Leslie and I could write a story about The Meters for Francis Ford Coca was city of San Francisco magazine. I took this photo of the meters when they were at a reporting studio in San Francisco. But before that in 1975, I didn't even talk to the bands. Instead I interviewed Harry Doepin over the phone. Leslie and I wrote the article based on that conversation and some other research. And then I wrote a letter to the arts editor at Coca was magazine telling her that Albright and Prasner both thought this article might be right for city of San Francisco. Our article on the meters was published and so it began our professional career as journalists. This is a photo of Professor Long here who the Great New Orleans piano player who Harry Doepin also brought out to San Francisco to do a show and who Leslie and I interviewed at his hotel room one afternoon. Early on I learned that if you were going to succeed at music journalism, you had to take chances. You had to get access to the musicians you wanted to write about any way you could. Sometimes that meant getting to the artist dressing room, approaching them when you saw them at the top of a driveway or walking down the street of Mill Valley or finding out where they lived and knocking on their door. Managers and promoters could be a big help. Years later, Bill Graham was playing a major role in organizing the benefit concert live aid. So I approached him about accompanying him to Philadelphia interviewing him on the way there and hanging out with him at the concert. He went for it and after spending an evening with him in Manhattan the next morning we took the train to Philly me interviewing him all the way there. Once in Philly at the concert pleased with our conversation he gave me an all access backstage pass which made my job covering the concert much easier. After the concert I got a manager friend to bring me along to an after-concert party where journalists were very much not allowed. Attending that party were Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, members of Duran Duran, Miami Vice Star Don Johnson and others. During the party I spoke to those artists and after each brief conversation I would go out on the balcony where no one could see me and take notes on what they had said. That party became the opening scene of this cover story that I co-wrote about live aid and it made the story totally unique for what other journalists wrote about live aids. Another way to get access to rock stars was to write for a publication with a huge circulation. When I first started writing about music I was a copy person of the San Francisco Chronicle. While working at the Chronicle I got to know the editors of the Sunday date book also known as the Pig Section which covered music and movies among other things and which was seen by an estimated two million people each week. Record company publicists and artist managers wanted their artists to be in the Sunday date book especially if their solo artist or band was coming to perform in the Bay Area. I also wrote for the Berkeley barb at the time and would often combine an interview with an artist with a review of their show. Between the Chronicle and other publications I was writing for, I could get access to nearly any artist that was performing in the Bay Area be it Stevie Nicks or Tom Ways or Maria Moldar or Muddy Waters. Hawking heads are the clap or even on one occasion the recruits of Dan Morrison. Things didn't always go smoothly interviewing musicians especially punk musicians like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. When the Sex Pistols came to San Francisco in early 1978 to play what turned out to be their final show until they were grouped for a tour in 1996 I was supposed to interview some of them for the Berkeley barb at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco not far from Winterland where they were headlining that night. So I get to the hotel, end up in the group suite on the 10th or 11th floor and the road manager directs me into a bedroom and tells me to wait there for a couple of the band members who he says will be in shortly. So I'm in there for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And I get this odd feeling. I leave the room just in time to see the road manager, drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and some roadies leaving the room. This was gonna be a big joke on the reporter from the hippie weekly the Berkeley barb only I followed them all right into the elevator rode down to the first floor and followed them into a nearby Japanese restaurant and sat down right in front of Cook and Jones. I started my tape recorder and asked my first question. They were fairly belligerent but it all made for a great story. When Joe Strummer and Mick Jones were the clash where in San Francisco later in 1978 completing work on the clash's second album give them enough rope which includes the amazing song, Satan, European home. A music business friend got me into the recording studio when they were working with producer Sandy Perlman who I had previously met. During a break, Strummer and Jones and myself went to a small lounge area and I started to interview them. At that point, the clash were not popular in the US. I mean, nobody knew who they were. And in fact, their only album they knew the clash had not even been released in the US. I had an import copy and on it it said the drummer was named Terry Charms. Little did I know that Charms had been replaced by Topper Heaton. So I asked some question mentioning Charms and the two of them, Jones and Strummer start yelling at me. What are you talking about? You don't even know who's in our band? Why should we waste another minute with you? Jones starts playing a pinball machine and Strummer turns away. Somehow I still convinced them to let me stay and managed to complete an interview. I learned how to report stories and write profiles, teachers and essays by closely studying articles I like and by doing hundreds of interviews and getting really good at interviewing, writing hundreds of stories and working with a number of great editors. I spent nearly nine years learning my craft working single-mindedly towards getting hired by Rolling Stone. Every time I wrote an article for another publication, be it the San Francisco Chronicle or Francis Ford Coppola City of San Francisco or the Berkeley Barb or New Times or New West, I wrote an article that I thought would work for Rolling Stone. And I mean, I think it's pretty hard for people to realize right now that, I mean, back in the 70s, back in the 80s still, but especially the 60s and 70s, I mean, Rolling Stone was it. I mean, there were a couple of other music magazines but none of them compared to Rolling Stone. So if you wanted to write about music, that was kind of a holy grail. So as time went on, as the years passed, I didn't only interview the musician I was writing about, I would do my best to get access to friends of the musician, sometimes to their mother or father, to their producer or their manager, musicians who worked with them and so on. The more people I interviewed, the broader the perspective I'd have on the artist, and that made for a better story. Eventually, at the end of 1983, after several years of writing freelance articles for Rolling Stone, I was hired as a senior writer by Rolling Stone's music editor, the late Jim Hickey. And for 10 years, I had one or two stories in nearly every issue. It was exciting and fun to hang out with rock stars and musicians. I lived in San Francisco, but at least twice a month, I'd fly down to LA and live at the Sunset Marquis, an upscale hotel in Hollywood where movie stars like Sean Penn, rock stars like Rick James, and music business executives like Bruce Springsteen's manager, John Landau State. I typically had a room on the second floor overlooking the pool and would sometimes sit out by the pool or on the balcony outside my room, preparing for interviews I would conduct while in LA. It was quite surreal and for the decade I worked at Rolling Stone, it felt like I had two lives. The one in San Francisco where I would drop off my son at school, go shopping for groceries with Leslie and work from an office in our Glen Park house. And the one where I entered the rarefied world of rock stars and music executives coming out with them as I documented their lives. To get the material you needed, you had to be gutsy. I had interviewed Stevie Wonder for a cover story and I spent time in his private recording studio in LA to write that story. Later, I was working on a Michael Jackson cover story. I wanted to interview Stevie Wonder about the self-made King of Pop, but I knew that if I called his publicist at Motown, I'd never get to him. So I drove to the studio where I had been previously, told one of his guys that I was from Rolling Stone and was there to interview Stevie again, and they just let me in. And soon I was sitting on a couch talking to Stevie, asking him questions about Michael Jackson. During one three-week period, I flew to England to interview friends and associates of Boy George for then heroin-addicted pop star. Then flew to New York, wrote a cover story about George during an intense day and a half that ran with the title Boy George's Tragic Fall. Then drove up to Woodstock where I interviewed several members of the band about Robbie Robertson, who I was profiling for a story that would be published when his first solo album was released. I interviewed Robbie in Woodstock as well as as part of a year's work on and off reporting about him and observed him working on his album at the late Albert Grossman's Bearsville studio with bassist Rick Danko adding background vocals to a song. And after three or four days, drove back to Manhattan and flew home. Well, I usually didn't do drugs with rock stars. In 1983, shortly before I was hired by Rolling Stone, I was asked to write a major 4,000-word profile of Rick James, who had become a huge star thanks to his hit, Super Free, and had a new album about to be released. Rick and I had already gotten to know each other. I had written stories about him that he liked for the San Francisco Chronicle, Musician Magazine, Rolling Stone, and the record. I was supposed to meet him in the evening at the record plant, the recording studio in Sausalito where he had recorded his hit album, Street Songs and the upcoming albums. I was supposed to accompany him in his limo to the San Francisco Airport and fly to LA and spend two or three days hanging out and talking with him. Well, when I got to the studio, I was told Rick was with Sly Stone, a Sly and the Family Stone, and I'd have to wait until he was done talking to Sly. What I didn't know was that they were free-basing cocaine. So I took a seat in the hallway, an hour went by, another hour. These people were apologetic, but there was nothing they could do. Finally, one of his guys came over and offered me a baggie of cocaine. Rick's real sorry, the guy said. He wants you to have this. Although I did not normally snort cocaine, for the next few days, I made an exception. Another time, I flew to New York to hang out with Sya Records founder Seymour Stein for most of a week. Seymour had signed Madonna and Depeche Mode and the Talking Heads and the Ramones and the Replacements and Echo and the Bunnymen and others. He was a major record business executive, and so I was gonna do a profile on him. So one night, Stein and I ended up at a music business attorney's house in Manhattan. And one of the rooms was a huge glass bowl, like a large salad bowl, and it was full of cocaine. And Seymour and the attorney and one of their friends stood around that bowl, snorting coke for hours. That time, I didn't partake. While it was exciting to hang out with rock stars and music executives, Worthy for Rolling Stone was a very demanding job. For me, it was pretty much 24-7 for 10 years. With a source return my call at eight or 9 p.m., I dropped whatever I might be doing and interviewed him or her. If you didn't take the call, you might never get them on the phone again. There were occasions when I didn't sleep for 40, 45 hours. I mean, 48 hours, sorry. Reporting a cover story on James Brown, titled Behind Bars with the Godfather of Soul, I spent days in Augusta where Brown was living, talking to members of his band, his wife, police officers who had been out to his house after he shot holes through his wife's main coat with a shotgun, and others that knew him. Flew to Atlanta to spend an afternoon with singer-songwriter Bob Byrd, who gave Brown his first break and then drove to a downtown hotel where I spent most of the night interviewing another former member of Brown's band before driving back to the airport and flying back to Augusta the next day to continue my reporting. I mean, I didn't sleep for two days. One exciting moment of my career came when my wife answered the phone one day when I was doing phone interviews, collecting comments from musicians about Roy Orbison, who had just died. Leslie later told me that she picked up the phone and a British voice said, is Michael Goldberg there? She said, can I tell him who's calling? The man said, George Harrison. I've interviewed a lot of musicians by then, but former Beatle George Harrison, wow. I felt like I had felt when I was when seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show when I was a kid. Last year, one of the two books I published was Addicted to Noise, The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg. I'll be reading excerpts from that second book, which contains stories I wrote between 1975 and 2022. I'm gonna start with a piece I wrote about the San Francisco Sound for a booklet that was passed out to attendees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards Dinner in 1994. The San Francisco Scene. These are, that's Sam Andrews up in the upper left, Janice, Phil Lesch of the Dead, and Peter Kramer of the Sovereign Panel. There's Grace Slick, Paul Cantor, another shot of Grace, shot of Paul, Bob Rear and Jerry, Phil Lesch of course. The word on the street was a big brother in the holding company, one of San Francisco's preeminent rock bands was going to perform in Golden Gate Park, for free. So one morning in 1968, at age 14, I stuck out my thumb and hitched a ride from Mill Valley where I lived into San Francisco to see one of my favorite bands. I was let off near the park and it took perhaps 15 minutes to reach Speedway Meadow a long grassy expanse serving as the concert site. Even before my arrival, I knew I was close because of the guitar-driven Rock and Roll coming through the trees. A crowd of a few hundred people which would grow to perhaps 2000 had gathered. I took in the idyllic scene. Groups of young, though all older than me, long-haired men and women sitting together on colorful blankets, digging the sounds, the sweet smell of weed and incense in the air, a frizzy-haired guy blowing bubbles, a woman sunning topless, a few tripped out souls dancing near the stage, couples making out in the grass. Eventually Janice, the epitome of the hippie chick with her long, wild hair, oval granny glasses, numerous bracelets, beaded necklaces, Southern comfort bottle and seemingly free spirit and her big brother bandmates, guitarist James Gurley and Sam Andrew, bassist Peter Alden, drummer David Getz, took the stage. The performance, that performance by big brother gave that day, stands as one of my greatest Rock and Roll experiences. And not just because I witnessed Janice's bloody impassion liberating on stage persona and that wiser-than-her-years voice that so deeply conveyed heartache and heartbreak, love and lust, pity and pain. Big brother rocked. They were loud, hard, savage Rock and Roll rebels, tough enough to survive being the house band at Hell's Angels beer busts. Janice's vocals from a whisper to a horse scream could get you that close to ecstasy. Big brother were the nirvana of their days. Their raw, brutal sound predated both the punk movement of the mid-70s and the grudge scene of the 80s. Their repertoire, down on me, piece of my heart, all is loneliness, call on me, ball and chain, light is faster than sound, huku and others was exquisite. Their delivery visceral and often transcendent. I like drummer Mickey Hart's Off the Cup review. Recalling his first big brother sighting at a closet-sized club called The Matrix, Hart told me, quote, brother were going crazy feeding back and Janice stepped to the mic and it split your head open. At the end of that magical afternoon, as a cool wind began to blow fog in off the ocean, I walked out of the park, stuck out my thumb, was soon back in Marin. Perhaps there was another place during the late 60s where you could experience some of the world's greatest rock and roll for free, but I doubt it. The Sound of the City. Because the San Francisco Sound coalesced amid the utopian idealism of the Bay Area's hippie movement, the civil rights effort, leftist politics, environmental concerns, and the psychedelic drug culture, it's impossible and I believe pointless to isolate it from its context. Such trippy, exotic jams as the Grateful Dead's epic dark star Country Joe and the Fish's section 43 or Big Brother's Reinvention of Summertime are for me and I think for anyone who had the chance to wander down Hade Street in the mid-60s or attend the dance concert at the Family Dogs Avalon Ballroom, the sounds that go with the sights of that strange and wonderful time. The bands provided the soundtrack for the dance concert light shows, exotic multimedia wall paintings composed of ever-changing slides, film loops, liquid projections, and other effects staged by such oddly-named visual art groups as the North American Ibisop chemical company. The soundtrack for a day of dreaming and possible dreams out in the park, of making love for the first time, of LSD and marijuana-tinged visions, of spiritual possibilities. Since the mid-70s and the arrival of punk and harder drugs, it has been fashionable to dismiss the idealism, optimism, and ecstasy of the San Francisco scene. One young writer, a 20-something born too late to experience the scene firsthand, recently wrote, as if it were something to be proud of, that she has, quote, little empathy for 60s nostalgia or the remnants of the hippie dream, unquote. Now, I'm the last person to pine for what was, but as an adolescent in love with rock and roll, I was there. I walked the hate, amazed by the free-wheeling, bizarre-like atmosphere, far-out music wafting from open windows, the sidewalks crowded with groovy kids. I went to the Avalon Ballroom in the Fillmore, the Carousel Ballroom in Winterland. I stayed up listening to DJs on KMPX and then Freeform Underground Rock Radio and dug the psychedelic posters. This went up, that went up in the windows of bookstores and coffeehouses announcing the upcoming concerts. The 20-somethings have a vested interest in denying a past thing that's down on them. I can understand that. They want their own culture and they want it to feel important. But to deny the window into utopia that existed or at least for a few years in San Francisco is to deny history. Freedom calling. The San Francisco sound was the sound of freedom, freedom to dress, behave, and live the way one wanted, to escape the confines of a straight, square, normal, inhibited, nose to the grindstone, middle-class life. Some of us even believe that a pursuit of one's art took precedence over the pursuit of money. Today, of course, in the age of AIDS, a homeless, gang violence, a shrinking job market, and all the other social ailments plaguing our society, that sounds so naive. Something only a kid or spaced out hippie could be sucker enough to buy into, right? The details of what happened in San Francisco are known. How to note, how to note one example, a bunch of folk and blues musicians plugged in, dropped a lot of acid, and calling themselves the Grateful Dead created a psychedelic American roots music that has a larger following today than it did in the 60s. Most of the important bands have been written up so many times that telling their stories seems redundant. The Jefferson Airplane, the acid rock combo with the phenomenal singers Ray Slick and Marty Ballin, mixing up rock blues and folk with lyrics about both love and radical politics. The Quicksilver Messenger Service, whose mercurial lead guitarist, John Cipollona, took the primal rhythms of Bo Diddley into a mind-boggling realm with his endlessly creative improvisations. Country Joe and the Fish, pioneers of a hallucinogenic brand of spaced out rock that can be heard on their priceless, appropriately big titled debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body. So many cool bands, the charlatans, Moby Grape, the Bo Brummels, the Flame and Groovy, Sly and the Family Stone, Queen's Clearwater Revival, The Sons of Champlain, Clover, Blue Cheer, Flying Surface, The Mystery Trend, The Great Society, The Sparrow, The Steve Miller Blues Band, The Sock with Camel. The fans would rip you apart. The San Francisco sound was so accessible. At the Avalon and Fillmore, when the musicians weren't on stage, they were often on the dance floor. Quote, as soon as you got through performing, you could go down and dance in the audience, Ray Slick once recalled. I did that. We'd wander in the crowd before and after we played. You can't do that now. The fans would rip you apart. So that's not the whole piece, but that gives you a pretty good idea. Now I'm gonna read a little bit of a piece that I wrote in 2018, called Inventing Punk Rock at the Mabue. And this piece is about the lasting impact of the San Francisco punk club, the Mabue Gardens. So it begins with a quote, better watch out for the new world, which is from a song called Sister Little, performed live at the Mabue Gardens by the Sleepers in 1978. As if rock never happened. No Chuck Berry, no Elvis, no Beatles, no Stones. Sometimes it was like that. Other times it was a raised middle finger to all that preceded them, the punks. A fuck you to the past from the present, from the future. When you least expect it, the world reinvented in some small out-of-the-way place that no one is paying attention to. And in 1976 in San Francisco, because Dirk Dirksen, a former TV producer who had since run a surfing business in Santa Cruz, convinced Nessa Queeno, owner of a tired Filipino nightclub at 433 Broadway to let him promote occasional shows there in the evenings, that place located among topless bars and strip clubs was the Mabue Gardens. What took place at the Mabue felt brand new. It was a new society with new values coming together night after night, participating in a kind of ritual, a series of bands alienated from the mainstream on the small stage expressing their emotions in a raw, visceral manner, and an audience of equally alienated music fans there to hear the emotional and political news those bands were delivering. Quote, it was so thrilling embracing to see these people whose every aesthetic choice was about repudiating everything that the sixties counterculture had stood for. Novelist Jennifer Egan told me. Egan, who says that as a teenager, she went to the Mabue weekly during the late seventies, set part of a chapter of her 2011 Pulitzer winning book of Visit from the Goon Squad at the Mabue. Of course, in the mid seventies, this new world I'm telling you about, this world that acted like nothing that came before it mattered, was seemingly being invented everywhere. There were numerous ports of entry in New York, in Cleveland, in Seattle, in LA, in London, but if you lived in San Francisco, yours was the Mabue, also known as the Fab Mab, or simply the Mab. Now, these are some more pictures I wanted to show you from the up. Sorry, that's John Cipollina playing at Winterland. That's Jesse Cullen Young of the Young Bloods, sitting in an office the Young Bloods had in Point Reyes, and that's Banana, the keyboard player of the Young Bloods, indulging me and holding a couple of Bananas. No, I'll wait for that. All right. So continuing on the Mabue Gardens, in terms of San Francisco punk rock, it was a community epicenter, Egan said. It was so original. The anger, the pace, the energy and the rage were all incredibly compelling to me. As a sort of troubled teen, I could not get enough of it. Low ceiling than brick walled, the first maybe three quarters of the club was a terraced hillside of tables to sending to a crowded dance floor, except that amid the people on the dance floor were small round tables and retan chairs, and sometimes Penelope Houston of the Avengers might be sitting in one of those retan chairs, and some nights, such as on January 3rd, 1978, negative trend singer Roz Rezebek would climb on top of the huge loudspeakers and leap off what artist Bruce Connor called the Shinai stage, knocking other people and chairs. The stage was small, but there was room for a drum kit up against the brick wall, two or three musicians in front of it, a singer up close to the edge, and plenty of drama. When the Mabue was empty in the afternoon, or after everyone finally went home, and you could actually see the place, it was worn out, more than worn out. It had been kicked in the stomach and never recovered. But at night, alive with punks and high school kids like Egan, that didn't matter. In fact, anything less messed up would have been so wronged. The Mabue was where survivors of World War III converged, a kind of post-apocalyptic hideout for conspiring anew. How we climbed at the time of DJ Ryder, who started four or five records during the Mabue's heyday and released records by the Nuns and Romeo Void, says he hung out at the club for every night for years, every single night, seven nights a week, literally, for years. Quote, especially in the beginning, yet the Mabue was very much dedicated to punk rock and a punk ethos, he recalled. The idea of rejecting that which was the establishment at the time and starting something completely new on every level, whether it was the way you dress or the way you think or look at politics. And the Mabue was the central place for it to be happening. At first, punk rock didn't mean bands conforming to a dress code of Mohawk's black leather jackets and dog collars playing loud, fast, short songs. The punk movement of the mid to late 70s began in New York in 74 and 75, then spread to London in 75 and 76. In San Francisco in 76 and 77, the city's version of punk range from sex pistols influenced bands like The Avengers to indefinable bands like The Mutants. There was little in common musically or visually between The Avengers, Flipper, The Mutants, Crime, The Nuns, The Sleepers, and UXA. While crime sometimes appeared wearing police uniforms, The Mutants might show up all wearing white or as characters out of Alice in Wonderland complete with huge playing cards attached to their chest. Two few months after her boyfriend Michael Kowalski died of an overdose, VV Troy, singer for UXA, appeared on stage wrapped in white gauze like some femme fatale version of the mummy at one point lying on the stage, eyes closed. In the early years of the Mabue, Dirk Dirksen always said he was presenting, quote, Avant-Garde Theater. After the police raided the club and shut it down one night, Dirksen told me, quote, they, the police, see it as a punk club, but punk is just a part of what we do here. We've had great jazz performers like Sun Ra and George Shearing and people do not understand the satire of punk. Our people are in costume. They are not thugs. Still, despite what Dirksen said, various versions of punk rock were what mostly happened on the Mabue stage. If you wonder what was so different about the club, maybe this will help. Quote, one time the nuns bass player got stage fright and vomited and couldn't go on stage, how he climbed said. So the nuns threw his bass at me and said, you play, just do this and this. I had never held a bass before, but I went on stage and played and no one knew the difference. The scene at the Mabue was like a secret society. Only it was right out in the open and anyone could join. A price of admission, simply wanting to be there. Egan said, quote, the fact that a Lowell High School student like me and her friends, who I mean, we took drugs, but we were basically pretty straight arrows, could go there and enjoy it was part of the magic. It really did help for that moment to penetrate the larger culture, which would be me, a pretty ordinary high school student who was looking for action with her friends. Another San Francisco who visited the club, dug the scene and never left, well, at least for a year, was the famed Bohemian artist Bruce Connor, who had moved to the city in 1957 and become part of the beat scene. And then in the sixties, participated in another counter-cultural shift as a member of the Rock and Roll Light Show treat the North American Eye of the South Chemical Company, projecting psychedelic collages of film loops, photographs and colored liquid light paintings onto the walls of the Avalon Ballroom, as big brother in the holding company of country Joe in the Fifth Rock in the Place. Beginning in January of 78, Connor found needed inspiration in his frequent nights at the Mabue and proceeded to photograph the bands and the scene there for Search and Destroy, the San Francisco based punk magazine. Quote, in its own way, it, the Mabue scene reminded me of the energy of the poets, artists, filmmakers and dancers who had been characterized as the beat generation in the 1950s, Connor said during a 2005 interview with journalist, publisher, Mike Plant for his Cinemab magazine. Then in the sixties, some of the same people were called the hippie generation. This creative phenomena appeared to become publicly conspicuous in San Francisco every 10 years. I wish we could find more people with that kind of intensity today, Connor continued. It's worth gravitating towards that type of environment, a kind of activity that compels people to spite the limits of their technological and professional abilities to produce, perform and have their say. With a few photos in here that I didn't take, this was taken by my friend, Chester Simpson. So in 19, when was it? 1980, I believe it was. I accompanied James Brown to San Quentin Prison where he performed with his band. And this is an excerpt from the piece that I wrote about James Brown at San Quentin Prison. They are waiting for Mr. Dynamite, the godfather of soul, a prisoner of love, the sex machine. Mr. Please, please, please himself, soul brother number one, Mr. James Brown. Mr. James Brown is sitting in his dressing room for his dark curly, waiting for his dark curly hair to dry. The room is small and painted a sickly pale green. Brown sits with his knees spread apart, a large hand resting on each thigh. A stocky man, his perfectly white teeth contrast dramatically against his dark skin. He is wearing a white sweatshirts up to the neck and white jeans stuffed into knee-high black suede boots. Several diamond-acrusted gold rings glitter on his fingers. Behind Brown, a bunch of his stage outfits hang from an electrical pipe. These garish costumes of black, gold, red, silver, purple and white standex with glitter and sequins and intricate embroidery look funny in this dress, a dingy room. His hairspray, makeup, brushes and comb scattered around make this makeshift dressing room look like a very funky beauty parlor. Quote, you're a very strong believer in the American dream, I say to James Brown. Do you really believe that if a man works hard he can become a success? Well, didn't I do that? He asks almost defensively. I was a former inmate. I had eight to 16 years. More than most of the cats have out there meaning in San Quentin's. So since you made it, anyone can make it? Not anyone says Brown. You're the one that said that. I think the chance is there for anyone but anyone can't be a James Brown but there's something anyone can do. In America, there's something anyone can do if they want to. Everybody can't be a James Brown but they can go to work. But you gotta remember one thing. I went to work before I tried this. I was a janitor when I made please, please, please. Brown's first hit. So you gotta start somewhere. Most people don't wanna start in that place. I asked Brown how he came to record please, please, please and I set off fireworks. Mr. Stallings snaps James Brown. Mr. Stallings. Brown is calling for his personal manager. Sir, don't come here and ask me about the story of my history or my life. Shouts Brown glaring at me. Please don't do that. That don't make no sense at all. If you wanna talk to me, ask me about this show today. Mr. Stallings. The contagious tension of this prison has put the highly emotional Brown on edge. Sweat glistens on his immense forehead. He pulls his head out from under the white plastic portable hairdryer. His hair is wrapped around pink and green care curlers. You look out there and you see 99% of the people are Blacks, says Brown angrily. This is not just a prison. This happens to be a prison with almost all Black people and I feel sorry for them. I don't wanna see any prison but this prison is as one-sided as the system out there. Now we know we haven't got all Black criminals in the world but we need to do and see what we can do to our country so it's not so one-sided like that. Give those Black kids a hope. Give them a good education, continues Brown. Give them heroes. Let them know the true things. Let them know the true things. Let a man like James Brown go all the way to the top rather than trying to put him down. Let people succeed. Give them hope. Those kids don't see no hope. Those Black kids ain't ever seen a Black president and nine times out of 10, they won't ever see one. You look out there and see a lot of kids who won't ever have a chance. That's why the blues are so popular. Black people are so successful. Black people are pleading for health and pleading for life and we gotta change that. This country is no better off than it was 25 years ago. It would seem that with Ronald Reagan in office, I say, what do you mean Reagan? As far as I've been, we've been, what have any of the other presidents done? Nothing. None of the other presidents have never done anything about freeing up a Black man. So I don't care who you name, name anyone you want. Go all the way back as far as you want. Ain't no one ever free the Black people yet. They're still slaves. So you think things are getting worse? Worse? How can they get any worse, explains Brown. What can be worse than all the people in this prison being Black? What can be wrong? That they put you in there? Is that gonna be worse? I say in the 60s, the civil rights movement, but the movement stops, says Brown. All that money's gone. The Blacks that used to own the ghetto now rent it. How can it be worse? Anything happen worse, our country gonna be torn up. I'm scared. I'm scared when I go in a prison and see all one people. If it was all Whites, I'd be scared. Because I know all Whites aren't criminals. If it was all Hispanics, I'd be afraid. If it was all Indians, I'd be afraid. This looked more like a concentration camp than it does a prison camp between you and I. Brown stares down at the floor for a moment. This is depressing. I get very depressed when I see a prison like this. Very depressed. If anybody comes in here and says it's not depressing, they're crazy. They're not looking. We gotta do something on the outside to prevent it. We gotta end this one-sided affair. Patty Hearst, when she became a criminal, she became like a movie star, a folk hero. A black man do it. They mow some people dead. George Jackson and all those cats gone. Malcolm X gone. Rap Brown is not a hero. He's a criminal in exile. Every black person that comes along is not a hero. But Patty Hearst is a hero, and it's wrong. Brown is getting more and more excited. America is my home, and I'm very concerned about it. I'm very concerned about my country. It's not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, like John F. Kennedy said, and like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, judge a man by the contents of his character, not the color of his skin. I want educated people. Most of the cats in this prison didn't finish high school. You know, the black people, 80% of them are uneducated. That's 80% potential criminals and killers. I mean, you think a man is gonna suffer when he knows how to shoot a gun and make explosives? You think he's gonna suffer? You better hope he finds a job. It's a picture I took of Van Morrison, Neil Young at the boarding house, Tom Waits backstage at Zellerback Auditorium, Commander Cody at his place out in Stinson Beach, Mick Jagger playing at the Cow Palace. So this next story is about Patty Smith. That was a picture I took of her at the boarding house in 1975. That one as well. That's Tom Berlane, who later played with her and also she was good friends with and they shared the stage at CBGBs in New York. A few years later when Patty came to San Francisco and this was just last fall when she came to play it, I'm sorry, she did a reading and talked about her book and played a few songs at Dominican College. So in 1996, myself and former cream writer, Janie Pelsky interviewed Patty. This excerpt is part of the intro that I wrote that preceded the interview. In the beginning, so scrawny, she almost wasn't there at all. Patty Smith sat in the small, dark backstage dressing room exhausted. She had just completed the second of two high energy performances at the boarding house, a now long defunct San Francisco club and it was well past midnight. Her brow was covered with sweat. Her hair was, her shirt was soaked. It was the winter of 1975. Smith's debut album, Horses, had not yet been released. All the same, her four nights of shows, two performances a night were sellouts. Already the word was out about Patty Smith. She was the real deal, the genuine article, the spirit of rock and roll materialized in the form of a woman. In the village voice in April of 1975, James Wilcott, noting her stray cat cool, wrote that quote, skinny, skizzy Patty is on her way to becoming the wild mustang of American rock. A month earlier, in no less the publication than the New York Times, John Rockwell had proclaimed, Ms. Smith hasn't entered to be as significant an artist as American pop music has produced. In the dressing room, skinny, skizzy Patty is ready to talk. Rock and roll is higher than art, she told me. The eager young journalist when she had caught her breath. It's the only open form that we have left. Smith looked like Keith Richards kid sister. She was wearing espadrilles with multicolored ribbons that wound around her straight leg black Levi's and a striped black and white croon neck shirt. Quote, every other form, religion, art, politics has closed people off from each other, she said. But religion does have a chance of being universal. What I'm interested in is pre-tower of Babel time. As she spoke, she autographed a book of her poems that I had brought along. It's like before the Tower of Babel, when they split all our tongues, she continued, gaining momentum, everybody talked the same language. Everyone had the same rhythm. Everyone could communicate telepathically. I'm looking to rock and roll to be the new tongue extending. Despite her exhaustion, she had the look of a woman on a mission. It's like riding through the tunnel of love, she said, staring right through me and the tongue of love taking you there is rock and roll. Babylon. 21 years later, she stood on the stage at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. Quote, oh, I was bad. She was reciting one of her early poems, ballot of a bad boy. Didn't do what I should. Mama catch me with a licking and tell me to be good. Oh, God, she was bad. She swore, she stayed out all night. She shacked up with wild boys like Jim Carroll and boys for cults Alan Lanier. She sang about the hard stuff, heroin and looked up to the hard cases like Keith Richards and William Burroughs. None of which would have mattered if she couldn't deliver the goods. She could. Patty Smith was the first artist in the seventies to not only believe with her heart and soul that rock and roll was art but to deliver on that premise. She took dreamscapes and poetry and slammed them up against the rock of the rock. The three chord garage rock of Gloria and Hey Joe and Land of a Thousand Dances as Dave Marsh wrote 20 years ago. Somewhere, Patty firmly believed there was a place where Rambo's intense aesthetic lust met the Romettes' boyfriend's stud passion. In 1975, the first time I saw Patty Smith, I felt like I had seen the Messiah. That year, shortly after I saw five of her shows, I wrote that Smith was the most original and important artist since Bob Dylan. I went on to paraphrase whose Springsteen's line about looking for a savior before gushing Patty Smith in the seventies more so than Dylan in the sixties is that savior, that human we waited for not to lead us from Patty would be the first to quote Dylan's dope follow leaders but to hip us too as she sings in land the sea of possibilities. Patty Smith raised the stakes. Like Dylan before her, she refused to accept the prescribed limits of rock and pop song subject matter. Nothing was forbidden. She sang about death, sex, drugs and UFO spirits. All raw material for Smith to write lyrics that can really only be described as poetry and the way she delivered them, stretching words, whining them, shouting them, screaming them, firing them out like bullets from a machine gun. Listen to Birdland or horses. Listen to the way she delivers the line, I'm not human. Two decades after it was recorded it will still send chills up and down the spine. Like Smith, I'm sorry, live, Smith was a revelation. Sure she learned from the best, Hendrix, Morrison, Dylan, Jagger, Iggy but she had a presence of this is for keeps in an enormous intensity that made you believe that while she was performing nothing else mattered. In 1975, trying to describe my reaction to one of her shows, I wrote, I felt as emotionally and physically drained as Patty looked. His factory, Patty Smith invented herself, cursed with the most innocuous of last names she transformed herself into a rock and roll Rambo, the first lady of punk before punk had a name. She grew up poor in Pittman, a town in South Jersey. Dad, Grant Smith, was a factory worker. Mom, Deb Smith awaited us. She was the eldest of four children. One sister, Kimberly, is immortalized in a song on horses. No matter how bad things were, if we didn't have food or my father was on strike, my mother was always great in weaving a fantasy world. Patty Smith told me in 1975, telling us fantasy stories or getting us involved in stories. She grew up tough and to this day, there is a wiry edge to her. Don't cross Patty Smith. Quote, I grew up in a tougher part of Jersey than Bruce Springsteen. She told Dave Marsh at the beginning of 76. I wasn't horrified by Altamon. It seemed natural to me. Every high school dance I went to, somebody was stabbed. Naturally, it was the Rolling Stones in the mid 60s, not the Beatles that made her a rock and roll fan. Bob Dylan, who paved the way for Smith to mix up poetry and punk. Quote, the Rolling Stones really changed my life. She told me, when I saw the Stones on the Ed Sullivan show, it made being white cool again. About one of her heroes, she said, I only liked Dylan because he was looking cool. Growing up in South Jersey, just about all we listened to was black music. We were like little animals. We liked Gary U.S. Vaughns, anything that was danceable and dirty. She worked in a factory during and immediately following high school. That experience was the inspiration for a key song on her first single, Piss Factory. In that song, she recites, and I will get out of here. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna get out of here. I'm gonna get out of here. I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return. Never return, no, never return to burn out in this Piss Factory. And I will travel light. Oh, watch me now. While in junior college, she got pregnant and had a baby, which she gave up for adoption. In 1967, she came to New York and began hanging around Pratt, the Brooklyn Art College. It was there that she met Robert Maclethorpe, a future erotic photographer like her poetry. She'd started writing after discovering Rambo's illuminations. In 1970, after a sojourn in Paris and a brief return to Pittman, Smith moved into the infamous Chelsea Hotel with Maclethorpe. And in 1971, she met a rock critic who played guitar and worked in a record store named Lenny Kay. Soon they were performing together with Kay adding guitar accompaniment to Smith's poetry readings. That was also the year Smith had poems published in cream for the first time, including one titled Autobiography. She co-wrote a play, Cowboy Now, with Sam Shepard, and penned Career of Evil for the Blue Oyster Cult. By 1974, Smith's first record, the 45 with H. L. in one side and Piss Factory on the other, was released on Lenny Kay's Tiny Merit record label. Smith's band, the Patti Smith group, ultimately included in addition to Kay, pianist Richard Soul, second guitarist Ivan Crawl, and drummer J. Dean Daugherty. A year later, Smith was signed by Clive Davis to Arista Records. Her first album was produced by former Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale in Electric Ladyland. Drummer Daugherty later described working with Cale as, quote, health. Writing in The Village Voice, Gryll Marcus felt the album didn't quite live up to all the hype. I thought he was wrong then, and all these years later, I still think he underestimated the record. Still, Marcus did Smith the ultimate honor when he described it as, quote, an art statement, unquote. Crash Landing. Just before the release of Horses, Smith performed at a club called The Long Branch in Berkeley, California. At the show, between sets, I brought several photos I'd taken of Smith backstage and gave them to her. She liked the photos and she said she really dug the article that my wife Leslie and I had collaborated on for the Berkeley bar, quote, you're the first people to use that stuff about Tower of Babel, she said. That's real important to me. The next time I saw Patty Smith in the summer of 1979, a few months before she would drop off the face of the earth for some 17 years, everything had changed. The warm-inspired woman I'd last spoken to had transformed into something else altogether. She had agreed to a press conference of sorts in her hotel room. Standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by a small audience of fans and journalists, self-described Field Marshal Smith was holding court. You, she bellowed at a young woman. What are you doing here? Then, before the startled woman could answer, Smith addressed the rest of us. One by one, you're gonna tell me why you're here. If I don't like your reason, we'll have you leave. Something was wrong. Smith looked more like a crazy woman than a rock star who had entered the top 10 because of the night. Her longish hair was a tangle, a man's green leather sports coat, at least four sizes too big, hung from her gaunt body. The tight, dirty, orange striped pants stuffed into ankle-high moccasins looked as if they hadn't left her body in days. In fact, she looked like she'd slept in the outfit. Let me see those questions, she said to another woman. Give me those questions or I'll slap you. She said in a tone that was half humorous, half not so humorous. She was reluctantly given the list. Oh, here's a good one, Smith said sarcastically. How does the weather affect your creativity? Turning to me, she snapped. I've been fighting people like you all my life. You're not my type. Then she added half heartedly, don't take it personal. That was a scene straight out of Bob Dylan's documentary, Don't Look Back, when Dylan tells a Time Magazine correspondent, I know more about what you do and you don't even have to ask me how or why or anything just by looking at you than you'll ever know about me. During a radio interview at the time, it appeared that Smith had developed a God complex. Quote, to do this line of work is tough, she told a K-San DJ. Look at Christ, he only lasted 33 years. When you really believe in communication with your creator, it's a tough thing to be an earthling. Set Me Free. On September 10th, 1979, Patty Smith performed what would be her last live rock and roll performance for nearly 17 years before 85,000 fans at the stadium, come you now in Florence, Italy. Ask, quote, what happened, unquote, Smith now says, well, nothing snapped. Oh, ask what snapped. Smith now says, well, nothing snapped. Just touring and being parted from Fred Smith, her late husband, former guitarist for the MC5 became unacceptable. So I ceased to tour. I didn't say that I was never going to sit but on stage or make a statement about it. I just stopped. Quote, she was definitely in a different space. Smith's guitarist and current producer, co-producer Lenny Kay said, I thought maybe we take a vacation and come back but there really wasn't that much left we had to say. There were no songs sitting around waiting to be recorded. After wave, there was nothing. It was not one song idea. It seemed like our story was so complete starting from 200 people at St. Mark's Church in 1971 to 85,000 people in Florence, he added. You couldn't write a better movie. So, here's a few more photos, Dylan. Michael Bloomfield who, in addition to playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Electric Flag, a band that he formed. And with Al Cooper, I mean, he was a big star. He was considered in the late 60s. He was considered one of the best rock guitarists ever. And he played guitar on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album and the song Like a Rolling Stone. Well, so that's my book on Jimmy Willse. That's my book on, you know, addicted to noise book. And that's my book of photographs that's gonna be published next May. So I'm going to stop sharing the screen. Yeah, there we go. All right. Oh, thank you, Michael, for sharing your work and your stories. Very highly entertaining. So, participants, if there's any questions or comments or anything you'd like to ask Michael, you can put that in the Q&A and we'll relay those to Michael. We did get an email question that came in a few days ago from Janice. And Janice asks, what was the overall culture of the magazine and its heyday when it came to featuring stories about diverse ethnic groups and individual performers? I was 17 when Jimi Hendrix was featured on the cover in 1970. It was like losing a family member when he died. And thank you for listing him as the greatest guitar player of all time. Well, I mean, I wasn't there during the first 10 years of Rolling Stone. I mean, I didn't join the staff until, well, I started writing for them around 1980. So by then, Rolling Stone had been around for 13 years. So I mean, I can't really speak to, and the other thing was I always worked out of an office in my house, even during all the years I was on staff, because I was in San Francisco. And at that point, Rolling Stone had moved to New York. So the office was in New York. And all that was in San Francisco was a advertising office, small advertising office. So I worked from my house. So yeah, I really don't know. I wasn't around Jan Winner and even my editor, it was all over the phone pretty much, except my occasional, once or twice a year, I'd go to New York, but yeah. Okay. There's a comment here by Christine. She says, that is cool. Thank you so much for this valuable historical person, meaning you, so yes. Lynn says, thank you, Michael. I grew up in SF when everything you have shared was going on. I was more into Motown. Your presentation and writings caused me to realize how special those groups and bands were. To me, their music was harsh, but those years were harsh. There will never again be such a period in music. Yeah, nice. Yeah, I was way into Motown too, I gotta say. And I was really happy that I got to interview Smokey Robinson, and of course, as I mentioned, Stevie Wonder, and I also, the only, as far as I know, the only in-depth interview about himself that Barry Gordy Jr., who founded Motown Records, ever did, was with me. And that was really a privilege to be able to interview him. Yeah, I just, you know, I love Motown music. It's the best. Kelsey asks, did you become friends with any of the people you interviewed, like to the point they would be a godparent to their children? You know, my attitude was that, and maybe in retrospect, this was a mistake, but I took the attitude that I couldn't become friends with the people I was writing about because it would, I'd become biased in terms of what I would write. And I mean, I was trying my best to write accurate portrayals of my experience, of the people, the musicians I was writing about. And, you know, and like I said, I was talking to a lot of other people who knew them to really try to get a realistic perspective. And I mean, sometimes they liked the stories, sometimes they didn't like the stories. You know, I mean, but I couldn't, I wasn't trying to write stories that the musicians would like. The only person that, the only musician that I did become friends with was James Calvin-Wilsey, who I ended up after he died, I wrote a book about. And that was just a really unusual situation. But yeah, it just, I mean, there were people that, I mean, like I mentioned, you know, Rick James, I interviewed him so many times that when I would, you know, come back to talk to him again, it was a very friendly rapport that we had. And yeah, and there were others that I interviewed a number of times. I mean, I did kind of become friends with Cyril Jordan of the Flamin' Groovies, but I actually, for a period, I mean, I put out a record by the Flamin' Groovies at one point and actually managed them for a little while. So that, again, that was a very unusual situation. Yeah. Kathleen asks, this was an incredible presentation. Which musician in the current music scene would you love to get the chance to interview today? Well, the person that I have always wanted to interview from when I think as soon as I knew about interviewing was Bob Dylan, you know, and I would still like to interview Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is, and has been, you know, I mean, probably the most important musician in my life. And so, yeah, I would like to interview him. In terms of current music or more current musicians, Lana Del Rey is someone that I'd like to interview. I like her music a lot, but it was sort of, it was different, you know, when I was in my 20s, early 20s, it was a lot different than it is now for me. I mean, you know, when I was first, you know, in the early years of interviewing musicians, it was really a thrill to do it. I mean, and to be there interviewing Muddy Waters, or I mean, oh my God, you know, I mean, one of the greatest blues men of all time, or, you know, I mean, these, these, I mean, I knew who some of these people were, you know, and you know, Ramblin' Jack Elliott had been, I mean, Bob Dylan had followed Ramblin' Jack Elliott around in New York. I mean, so, you know, you know, Towns Van Zandt, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, or I mean, the Ramones, I mean, when I first interviewed, even when I first interviewed the, talked to the Ramones, I mean, it was clear that they were like, I mean, nobody had done, had made music like they made. You know, and so, yeah, so knowing how important some of these artists were, you know, it really meant a lot to me. But, yeah, now, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, I'm sort of more into almost taking photographs of musicians now than at the moment anyway, might be because I'm working on a photo book, but, and these things change, you know, I mean, sometimes I'm into one thing and sometimes I'm into another, yeah. So this next question kind of piggybacks on what you just said. It says, what do you think this pandemic has created for the music world and will you tour with your new book? Well, the pandemic has been terrible for the music world. I mean, my son manages bands and all of the bands that he works with, I mean, they couldn't tour for like, I don't know, two years or something like that. I mean, it was really terrible situation. I mean, for the, I mean, I'm not sure how some of the younger bands were getting along during that time. I mean, the big stars that he works with, because they had money, so they could survive it, but still, I mean, touring is a big part of most musicians' lives and to not be able to tour is a terrible thing. But I mean, now it's happening again. I mean, big tours are happening, festivals are happening. I mean, I'm not, I worry about it because people are getting COVID, it's not like it's gone away. But I mean, I will, when the photo book comes out, I mean, I'll definitely do some online things. I may do some in-person things in San Francisco, but I'll probably wear a mask when I do them. We'll have to just have to see what's going on at that point, but I mean, I love doing these online events because people don't have to be in San Francisco to be able to participate, but the in-person events are really special because you're all there together. I mean, it's really cool. So if I can do a few of those, I will. Yeah. Yes, and you get to sell your book. Let's see here. For music journalists, how have things changed? Well, they've changed a lot. I mean, first of all, I mean, when I started, there were tons and tons of magazines, you know, as well as newspapers, and you could make a decent living as a freelance writer. I mean, if you were lucky enough to get on staff, which I was, that was great. But even before then, I was making a living freelancing to all kinds of different publications, but there's way fewer publications now and online publications, I mean, in many cases, paid less than print publications paid back in 1975. I mean, I could not believe it. A major rock magazine, not Rolling Stone, but a major rock magazine, I was gonna do an interview for them. And when they told me how much they were gonna pay, which was $300, I just said, I can't do it. I mean, because it was just, I mean, it felt, it was like an insult. I mean, it's like, you're gonna write 3,000 words and you're gonna get $300. I mean, it's just not right. And so, okay, so for young journalists who were starting out, I mean, excuse me, for a young journalist starting out, I mean, they have to have, you know, I mean, I had another job when I started out, but still, I mean, I just don't see that there's, I mean, there's so, it seems to me, there's so few staff positions writing about music that, I mean, I would never recommend that somebody in high school or college pursue writing about music at this point. I mean, you know, I mean, it's just, I mean, I kind of lucked out, but in a lot of ways, and I feel very grateful for that, but yeah, and the other thing that's changed significantly is access. I mean, in the beginning when I started, I mean, you could, I mean, if someone was coming to town, I mean, I was doing like a thousand word piece on the band X. And so I showed up at their, you know, their motel and we hung out in the motel for an hour or so talking. Then we went to a restaurant in downtown San Francisco and we spent time there talking. And then later we went to a club in the mission and saw a black flag. And then the next day I wrote in the van with them to where they were performing. And so all that access, you know, and that wasn't even for like a big story. That was, you know, a thousand word story. You could, you know, you could go spend, you know, multiple days hanging around with musicians that, I mean, when I was doing stuff for Rolling Stone, you know, I mean, I spent, I don't know, three days just following Stevie Wonder around. I mean, started at his recording studio and, you know, stayed at his recording studio all night long into the morning and then just followed him on. I mean, he goes days without sleeping. And, you know, he doesn't know if it's day or night, doesn't matter to him. And so, yeah, just followed him around from day after day. I doubt that that would happen now. They, you know, record companies and managers, I mean, have, I mean, they want to access, they want you to have as little access as possible. And there was a great story, I mean, a pretty interesting story anyway, about Taylor Swift that was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, you know, last Sunday. And the writer didn't get to interview Taylor Smith. And she said, Taylor Smith, I could have this number wrong, but I think she said Taylor Smith had, you know, 300 and something, you know, million followers on, you know, Twitter or something, you know, something. I don't remember which social media, but, you know, and 300 and something million, maybe it was 400 million. And they said, the New York Times only has 92 million. So why did Taylor Smith let the New York Times act as an intermediary to tell her story when she can just tell her story directly to her fans? And she does. And so, you know, I mean, that's good for the artist. That's bad for the journalist. And I think it's bad for the public because I think you learn things and see things that you don't see when all you're getting is it just directly from the artist. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Michael, thank you so much for sharing your work with us. We will have to wrap up as the library's closing soon. There is a few closing comments here. One is your life and career sounds magical, which it does. Also, I love your advice that you have to be gutsy. So true. And I find it so inspiring that you continue to follow your dream and didn't spend much time on the fallback option as your dad called it. Thank you so much for this presentation. No, thank you. It was nice, yeah. One last question I have to ask and of the artists you interviewed, who was your favorite? Well, it's hard to just pick one. I mean, Frank Zappa, I mean, Captain DeFart was really important to me, but Tom Waits was really important to me, Neil Young. Patty Smith, absolutely. Sleeter Kinney for sure. They're a favorite band of mine. Yeah, those are a few. I mean, it's tricky, you know, because it's like on the one hand, there's someone who, I mean, the best story that I wrote, in my opinion, is a profile of Robbie Robinson. And I spent a year on that story, not a solid year, but I mean, you know, I went down to LA and spent a day with him and then a few months went by and I was in the studio with him. Then I was back, you know, at his, he has a little office studio and we hung out there. And then one time I was in, you know, Bearsville Woodstock, you know, with him. Then I was back in LA with him. And I mean, so I'd never spent as much time with one artist and never been over as much a period of time so that in the story, both time could pass and we could switch locations, which was really a cool thing to be able to do. So, you know, but that's, you know, it's like there's the people who were the best people to interview and there's the people who were, because you cared so much about their music, just getting to interview them meant so much. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody for attending tonight. We did record this program and it will be posted on our YouTube channel in the San Francisco library page, the link is somewhere in the chat, but it's also relatively easy to find at SAPL.org. So thanks again, Michael, for sharing your work and your stories and your books. So again, visit your local bookstore or visit us at the library and we'll help connect you. There you go. And here we got this one too. Yay, I don't know if it's all blurry. You get it. There we go. Okay. Okay. Anyway, yeah. And if you're interested in that Jimmy Willse book, the best place to get it is online at the book company's website, which is Hozak Records and Books. Yeah. Anyway, thanks again. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Good night. Good night. Bye.