Beautiful See-in at the Human Be-In
--by Sunbear
[Original typescript of an article published in The San Francisco Oracle I/5, reporting on the Human Be-in, in Golden Gate Park on January 14 1967, widely understood as inaugurating the San Francisco hippie revolution and the Summer of Love]
So I went down to the Golden Gate last Saturday to check out the scene on this free festival, the Human Be-In.
People, it was cool: weather was decent, nice sunny day, and there were just crowds of beautiful souls out in the Park: cowboys and Indians, fairy princesses and Vikings, mountain men and Hindu holy men, and the usual Golden Gate squares wandering through looking like they picked up the wrong guidebook. Minds were being blown in the most beautiful way, right and left. There were free balloons, a May-pole, beads and feathers, face-painting, beautiful giant soap bubbles, and flowers for everyone.
Things kicked off with a couple of the holy men, the poets Alan [sic] Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who walked all the way around the park “to sanctify it” they said. Ginsberg looked like a sadhu in a long cotton Indian tunic and Snyder looked like he’d just left a run with the Hell’s Angels—who were also there in the Park on Saturday. It all got started when Gary blew a toot on a seashell and Ginsberg started to sing Indian mantras. And Jerry Garcia’s new band (he used to have the Warlocks) played this wonderful free form set—called themselves “the Grateful Dead”—music was beautiful, lots of beautiful dancing and beautiful people.
But the real hero of the day was Professor Timothy Leary—he’s the man who made the whole scene possible: the Harvard professor who talked the straights into letting him run experiments with LSD. Because he proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that psychedelics could totally short-circuit all that process of opening your mind. Like, meditation was the scenic route, but acid is like getting shot out of a cannon made of flowers. And Leary showed that to the squares.
So when he stood up to talk, wearing a white tunic, with a string of beads around his neck, he looked like a hip college professor, or a philosopher—like a cat who you could trust really knew where it all was at. So all the beautiful people in the Park heard what he had to say and it was all beautiful—all about “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” and psychedelics could be the pathway to a wider group consciousness if we could just get the square world to see that. Well, practically everybody in the Park was turning on, so that was like we’d already completed the first step on the journey.
I was circulating through the crowd, just kind of checking things out and digging the beautiful vibes that everyone was putting out, and the clothes and the costumes, and toking a toke off of any joint that came my way, and it was great—really a vision of the way the New World coming is going to be: everyone happy, everyone grooving, no more wars, no more suffering, no more boring work, everybody just peaceful and joyful.
[…end article; however, the fuller draft continues as follows]
But I will tell you about one especially cool thing that I’ll bet not everyone there in the Park could have been hip to.
As I was circling the crowd, around behind the stage (all draped with bunting and giant amps for the Warlocks’ set), I passed this one guy under a tree. He was a hip -looking colored guy, sitting cross-legged on the ground, puffing on a pipe, with a violin case next to him. Friends, I didn’t know this dude, but he looked interesting, and I couldn’t help but notice how cool he was with the whole scene—just sitting with a half-smile on his face, and taking it all in. He wasn’t dressed nearly as up-to-date as the folks on the stage: just old jeans and a work-shirt, and work-boots, but he had this great look even so: tattoos up and down both arms, a big full white beard and his hair all ropey, kind of long braids—kind of looked like an Indian yogi or one of those old photos of Frederick Douglass we used to see in high school.
I kind of thought he might be with Emmett Grogan’s Diggers—he looked a little more like an anarchist than a peacenik—but they were down at the other end of the Park handing out free soup. When I stopped for a second to say hello, I caught a whiff of what was in his pipe—and I want to tell you it wasn’t any of that Mexican dirt-weed. Friends, I don’t know if I’ve ever smelt anything that smelled as potent as that bowl of whatever it was he had: it was like herbs and spices and a whole Caribbean market, just in the smoke. I caught just a whiff of it and I felt like I could already just float on away.
But the pipe itself is what really caught me: it was this wild thing, carved out of some kind of dark wood, that had a big bowl in the shape of an African woman sitting down. It sure didn’t look like the kind of tourist stuff they’re already hawking down on Haight Street.
“Nice pipe, man.”
The dude looked up at me and smiled. “Care to sit? More where that came from.”
He had an accent that sounded like a cross between Louisiana and something out of Casablanca or something like that. I sat down cross-legged next to him: “Hey, I’m Sunbear. I write for The Oracle.”
He puffed and smiled and passed me the pipe. “Pleased. Call me Etsy.” We sat and watched the crowd go by, and then I said
“You here to dig the Haight scene? Really something, isn’t it?”
He smiled, knocked out the pipe, and leaned back on his elbows. “Yes, it certainly is something.”
He told me that he was originally from Galveston but that he’d “been overseas for a good bit.” I just figured he might be one of those brothers who were starting to come back from Vietnam, some of them just totally turned-on and some of them ready to bring a little bit of Uncle Ho on home. But he shook his head:
“No, I’ve been in Europe, off-and-now, the last fifteen years. Mostly playing in orchestras. A lot in the East. A few of us came back with my boss, to visit Big Sur for a little while.”
I had to look twice at him for that; I’d figured him for the Now Generation’s age—I was 25, kind of an “old man” around the Oracle offices—but if he’d been playing in Europe for 15 years, he had to be at least five or six older than me. He didn’t look it, despite the white hair and beard—not a line on his face, and when he smiled he looked even younger. And “the East” sounded like a cool place to go.
“So like, where? Paris? Marrakesh? Tangier? Someplace cool like that?”
He shook his head again. “Naw—place called Bassanda. Further east.”
Well, I didn’t like to let on that I’d never even heard of Bassanda, so I asked him what kind of orchestras—that whole classical scene just seems like a total big drag; how can you make something beautiful and alive out of some music written a hundred years ago?—but he explained as how it was more like a co-op band; like a commune or something. Only classical music I knew was, like the stuff from Public TV that was on the tube when I was in junior high school, and some terrible film-strips they made us watch, but he said, packing another bowl of his potent dope into his carved pipe, “No, it’s cool—music from all over the world, and musicians too. Even if we have to wear suits.”
“Where is this orchestra at, again?”
He struck a kitchen match against his thumbnail, held it to the pipe’s bowl, puffed, smiled, and handed the pipe over to me.
“Place called Bassanda. Behind the Iron Curtain.”
“You mean in Russia?!?”
“Naw. One of the Satellites—you hip to satellites, like Poland? East Germany?—but closer to Asia. Ancient culture there, long before the Russians ever arrived.”
“How the hell did you get way out there?”
“Shipboard—Merchant Marine. That’s how come I didn’t get drafted. I grew up on the Louisiana coast—you know a place called Bay Tambour, in Plaquemines Parish? No?—Anyway, my daddy came from the Caribbean, and I been on boats since I was a little kid. Did a bunch of runs after the Big War in and out of Jamaica—that’s where I found out about Jah’s herb, here in the pipe—but then I wound up out I the Mediterranean. And friends of friends introduced me to the orchestra boss. Yezget-Bey.”
As if on cue, a long shadow fell across us, as I toked on the pipe. Startled, I looked up, and saw a very tall figures, silhouetted against the January sun. Etsy looked around and smiled: "Baba. Hello." He got to his feet.
"This is a new friend, name of Sunbear."