Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [229]
For music and showbusiness the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1960 was a hip place, a good market but on the margins. Everyone played the town, but nothing much had come out of there, except the first self-conscious wave of white Dixieland music. It was the sort of place where elderly masters such as the great jazz pianist Earl Hines settled down, secure in a good, solid club public. Even Duke Ellington accepted a club date rather than a concert there, thus providing me with the unforgettable occasion, the first since 1933, of hearing the band in the milieu for which it had been designed, namely a space with social drinkers where the real measure of a band’s impact was not applause, but the sudden silence as conversations ceased at the tables.
San Francisco, though not yet established as the Gay Republic or the hinterland of Silicon Valley, had a national profile and a recognized presence on the American scene, quite apart from the sensational beauty of its bay. It was a liberal city, though less politically radical than its neighbour Berkeley became in the 1960s, proud of its dissidents (not least Harry Bridges). Even then it was relaxed about drugs. By California standards it had freightcar-loads of history, the (then) most famous Chinatown, the memory of the Maltese Falcon, and a reputation as the most prominent centre of avant-garde literature in the 1950s, the ‘beat’ movement, fashionable enough for Ken Tynan to congratulate me on going there. ‘There’ was the area around Broadway, North Beach, a sort of Pacific St-Germain-des-Pres, where I would meet Ralph at the local Flore, and Enrico’s, facing the City Lights Bookstore, greeting and being greeted by the personalities of the city as they strolled past. Unlike the New York Broadway, on this Broadway people strolled. And across the Bay Bridge there was Berkeley. In the middle sixties ‘the white sons of middle class America’ briefly made it the quintessential scene of hippy youth and ‘flower power’, incidentally generating (as Gleason noted) ‘the first American musicians, aside from the country and western players, who are not trying to sound black’. 5 Ralph made himself the mouthpiece for the Haight-Ashbury music, groups such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, although he did not by temperament belong on the drug scene. Indeed, he gave up smoking grass. He belonged to the generation of intellectuals who smoked pipes, as I then did also. Never in good health, he died in 1975 aged fifty-eight.
For three reasons he became my window on America. Living in the world of jazz, an outsider music, he caught the vibrations of coming events which escaped others – the changing tone of the sounds that came from the black ghetto, the white kids’ avant-garde which discovered the force of the black city blues beat, the anticipations of the Berkeley student revolt which became national after 1964, global in 1968. These were not things noticed elsewhere in the summer of 1960. Nobody I knew on the faculties of Berkeley, still less the distinguished but stuffy Stanford, suggested I might be interested in going to the political camping weekend which the Berkeley leftwingers were organizing that summer, because none knew it was happening. Ralph did, who had no academic or recognizable political connections, but to whom students talked. Not that Ralph was much into organized political radicalism or moved in the circles of Bay Area leftism. The Symbionese Liberation Army