Our series of public library microfiche discoveries continues with Michael Fallon’s San Francisco Examiner series on the hippies of Haight Ashbury. The Blue Unicorn is the central caffeinated meeting space of the hippies of Haight Ashbury, but is it a business or an art form? Fallon investigates; this piece was published on September 6, 1965 … Read More
We got curious about Dennis McNally’s reference in A Long Strange Trip, to a 1965 series of San Francisco Examiner articles by Michael Fallon. The articles are referenced in almost every major book about the era, as the first use of the word hippie in print – derived from the beatnik’s hipster – to describe the shifting culture of the … Read More
You’ve probably heard about what it is to struggle to be an artist. Some have struggled pretty hard, including a music composer named Charles Edward Ives (left), who was largely ignored during his lifetime (1874 – 1954). This had a major impact on the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh. “Phil was going to college of San … Read More
The book Harrington Street was not completed before Jerry Garcia’s death, but is billed as an autobiography of the musician and author until age 10. The Grateful Dead’s current exhibition on the literary history of the band at the Archive at UC Santa Cruz features one particularly out of place primary source – a photocopy … Read More
Did you ever want to turn into a fly on the wall, so long as it was in a room where your favorite legend was being interviewed by a great journalist? That’s what it feels like listening to Michael Lydon interview Jerry Garcia in an hour long audio clip available on Amazon. Journalists did the … Read More
“Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley always claimed that they photocopied that book, they didn’t, they cut it out with a pen knife. So this is not that copy,” Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether told us, looking over a medieval era art book (right) on view at UC Santa Cruz, “but that’s the way they got … Read More
“Cats’s Cradle is basically nothing more than a kind of whimsical but dark vision of Pandora’s box and technology run amok,” said Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether at UC Santa Cruz. “[It] gave [the Grateful Dead] the metaphor for what they wanted to do with their ideas.” Not the string game, of course but the Kurt … Read More
The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human was a fascinating connection of perspectives in the literary tradition and timeline on exhibit at the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. According to Wikipedia, “the novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to “blesh” (a portmanteau … Read More
On October 4, 1961, comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco on obscenity charges for saying what amounted to “two four-letter words and a preposition.” You may be wondering what this has to do with Jerry Garcia. Nicholas G Meriwether over at the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz … Read More