At the second break, Steve and John came back to remind me that we had to get back home. Steve had been abusing his car privileges lately and he had to get his mom’s car back or risk being grounded. I had to go to Joe and tell him that I had to split and get back to Canada. (I didn’t tell him about the wrath of Steve’s mom and the threat of grounding). He laughed and said it was cool. He handed me fifty U.S. dollars and the whole band thanked me.
As Steve, John, Howard and I were leaving Country Joe & the Fish started their third set with Joe on drums. The song they were playing was, Louie Louie. I didn’t know what was more astonishing; the fact that I had played a gig with Country Joe & the Fish or that they were playing Louie Louie. The fifty dollars filled the Fairlane's gas tank and we all ate pizza for a week.
On May 27th The Jefferson Airplane headlined another Trips Festival, this one at the Richmond Arena. There was also a band from Seattle called The Magic Fern and local bands, The Painted Ship and The Collectors. The Collectors had morphed out of the top forty band, The C-FUN Classics, but now with Bill Henderson on guitar and Ross Turney on drums. They released an exquisitely produced record titled, Looking at a Baby and created a mind-blowing 19-minute piece called What Love Suite. They were one of best bands I have ever heard. It was impressive to see and hear the legendary Airplane and to experience all that they represented from the Hippie 'Mecca', San Francisco, but it was The Collectors who got to steal the show.
Nevertheless, Steve, John and I were there for another reason. We were determined to get high. I had blown my chance to smoke pot with The Fish in Seattle. Now, I felt like I would not belong until I’d dropped acid. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I figured I had already jumped ahead to “Tune In” - now it was time to go back and “Turn On”. I was still unclear about the “Drop Out” part. I didn’t have to be - by design, it would work itself out once I had achieved the first two. We found a guy who claimed to be holding and we followed him to a deserted corner of the arena. We bought six capsules for three dollars, dropped one each and waited for the ride to kick-in. After about a half an hour of forced hallucinations I had nothing but a throbbing headache. No amount of squinting and grunting could conjure up a single vision. Not surprising, given that what we had taken was ephedrine, an antihistamine for hay fever. We were so embarrassed by our failure to get off that we split before The Airplane had finished their set.
Steve, John and I remained steadfast in our quest to score and turned to Jim to help us out. He had a friend who copped us three tabs of genuine LSD-25. It was a huge white pill (like a giant Aspirin) made of baking soda with a blob of bluey-green goo painted on top. I wondered if it came directly from the lab of Californian chemist Stanley Owsley himself who was to acid what Henry Ford was to the automobile.
We skipped school in the afternoon and met Jim at his friend, Norm Williams' parents' house in Kitsilano. It was a nice little bungalow with an English garden and white picket fence. The matching sofa and wing-back chairs in the living room had doilies on the arms. We stood in a circle in the middle of the room each holding the tab in our palm. Then each of us gulped it down and prepared ourselves for whatever was about to happen to us.
It was like the start of a roller coaster ride when the car begins its slow climb up the first big hill and your heart is beating fast and you’re excited and scared at the same time. I could almost hear the sound that the chain makes when it grabs on and pulls the car up the hill; ca-clack, ca-clack, ca-clack, ca-clack.
Norm put the Beatles’ Revolver album on the stereo. I was sitting on the floor in a sunbeam. As Paul McCartney sang Good Day Sunshine I felt the first wave of exhilaration wash over me. The car had reached the top of the hill and was suddenly rushing down the hill at a frightening speed. All my senses were beautifully distorted. Colours were wildly vivid, shapes swirled and shifted, even the music was more perceptive - more lucid. Somebody put on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I sat cross-legged listening intently to every single syllable of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall over and over as if Bobwas talking directly to me; yeah, me and a million other stoned-out hippies sitting cross-legged staring at a speaker cabinet as if it were the top of the mountain.
We tripped all afternoon at Norm’s until it got to be about the time that his parents were due home. We split and headed to Kitsilano beach. As the sun went down I wandered along the beach acutely aware of sights and sounds. We found some markings drawn in the sand. I was convinced that they were messages from the Martians. 'Mind-altering or mind-expanding?' I thought. Who cares, when for three bucks you can talk to aliens, it’s better than television.
We had crossed the line, creating a division within the band. There was Steve, John and myself, the Acidheads, on one side and Bob and Frank, the Straights, on the other. The tension between the two camps made us all uncomfortable.
My grandfather died. The morning of the funeral I came out to the car inappropriately dressed in my purple and green striped suit made for me by the tailor at Positively 4th Street. My dad was mortified. He couldn't understand how I thought I could show up at the funeral looking like a character from Dr. Suess. He never asked for much from me but he demanded that I change into the one conservative suit that I owned (bought for me when my sister got married). I refused. We argued. He forbade me from going.
My grandfather fought in the Great War then signed on for a stint as a Royal Guardsman at Buckingham Palace. He wore one of those huge busby hats called “bearskins”. He came to Vancouver with my grandmother during the Roaring Twenties and built three houses in Kitsilano. When I was very young, he used to take hold of my hand and lead me through the paths of Tatlow Park even though he was blind by then. He was always nice to me and I loved him.
Being a teenager wasn't easy. I was so fucked up that I chose a suit over the honour of my own grandfather.
The fascist regime at school was bearing down hard on radicals Bob, Steve, Howard Diner and I. One day they came goose-stepping into my class and dragged me out for the crimes of self-expression and non-conformity. I, and my contemporaries, were each locked in separate closets next to the nurse’s office all day long. They claimed that I was a threat to the entire school and must be quarantined so as not to infect the other obedient sheep - er, students. They believed that I must be shunted away in a cell so as not to contaminate these impressionable sheep - er, students, and instigate a full-scale revolt; they did not understand that it was already happening. They turned the screws by informing me, rather gleefully, that if I missed a single day they would kick me out for truancy.
So, each day, I would arrive in the morning and go into the box until lunch. They let me out for the lunch-hour and I was allowed to fraternize with the other inmates but then I finished my educational day with two more hours of solitary confinement.
It all came crashing down around them when, one day, I mentioned what was happening at school to Jim and his friend, Keith Light. Keith’s mother was a writer for the Weekend Magazine in the Vancouver Sun Newspaper. She wrote a story about our plight and the ensuing protest from the public about torturing high school students had heads rolling all up and down the Vancouver School Board.
Since we smashed the reign of terror at school by abolishing the strap and the detention as we knew it, and by disposing of the architects and executors, the entire disciplinary system was disintegrating. Girls were now seen in class wearing jeans and the boys had hair to their shoulders. Many students were congregating on the lawn just outside the school principal's office smoking cigarettes and other strange substances.
Steve was still seeing Marilyn. So was Geoff. They had agreed to share her on some sort of alternating schedule.
Late one night, after another make-out session in Cates Park by Deep Cove, we let Louise off at her house. I sat frustrated and dejected in the