Time In San Francisco

I’m in San Francisco right now – have been for over a week and will be until the 21st. I love it here, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. I grew up down in Cupertino, so this is my old stomping grounds. I graduated high school in 1967, the Summer Of the Big Buzz, and flew right into the waiting arms of Augustus Stanley Owsley The Third! My brain cracked like an over excited light bulb, and I almost drowned in the stained glass worlds of extra dimensional holographic lucidities. It was the time of the home coming napalm terrors, with me and my childhood friends running in cosmic circles around and from the police, in all their many forms. Nothing was ever the same after that. I can go back there in a flash just by going to Golden gate Park.

I’m house sitting here for my friends Richard and Helga who are in Europe on Holidays. I have a few gigs around the area, making a little money so I don’t have to eat off of other people’s plates in the cafes. I played in Fairfax and San Anselmo, Santa Cruz and Pescadero. Soon I do a barbecue in Santa Clara and an Irish bar in san Francisco. Then a gig at winery in Murphy, in Sierra foothills. I drive back up north after that, stopping to see my dad in Medford.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet but I need to connect with Michael O Connelly, in Santa Cruz. He’s calling himself Michael O these days and plays with a harmonica player named Virgil Slaughter. (why can’t I have a name like that? What’s with this “Jim Page” nonsense? Why not Homer Destroyer, or William the Decimater?) Anyway, his gigs don’t seem to correspond with my empty spaces. Here’s a little You Tube thing to give you an idea. I go back 42 years with Michael O, and that kind of time doesn’t slide by easily. That carries some weight.



He and I were part of an amazing and magical scene down in Los Gatos in the late 60s. It was me, Michael O Connelly, Chris Ramey, Billy Dean, and Pat Simmons – it was unknown and invisible to anybody who wasn’t in the loop but it made a big impression on me. I left on New Years Day, 1970 – hit the hitch hiker’s road to New York City. The scene went on without me and people went their separate ways. Pat Simmons went on to form the Doobie Brothers. Chris Ramey became the greatest bar singer around, and had the drinking capacity to prove it. Billy Dean died while playing a three day biker party, the way I heard it. And O Connelly moved off into the distance, living in Central America for a while, and later on winding up in Amsterdam with one of life’s habits. Ramey’s dead now too, he passed on about 4 years ago, so there’s not many of us left. Just Pat, Michael and me. Michael was old friends with Robert Hunter, of Grateful Dead fame, and Ramey was one of the original Pranksters, so that’s how that circle goes. Life goes on and there are too many stories to ever all get told. Maybe some of them will leak out from time to time. Maybe I can help in the process.

Anyway, I promised to myself that I would get this blog thing going again. And I promised my writer friend Danny Morrison that I would practice. So here goes.