[Landline] For the Duration of Our Parallel Flow
1. WHAT THIS IS
Landline is a free, to-the-point email, sent by me every once in a while to a list of around 3,800 subscribers. Irregular epistles intended for friends, colleagues, Arthur Magazine heads, pastoral people, dharma people and other curious sweetfolk, made up of ideas, nudge and announcements that hopefully form a small bailiwick outside the unceasing current of cruddiness.
2. MUSIC FROM SOME OTHER EAR
Latest additions on my Spotify playlist include vintage Herbie Hancock, lots of Meat Puppets, Hama, Agitation Free, Redd Kross, Muslimgauze, the Growlers, Buzzcocks, Bob Dylan, Meg Baird & Mary Lattimore, Jonathan Richman, Dr. Alimantado, Kiki Pau, T-Model Ford, Paul Wine Jones, Dan Penn, Felt, Frances Bebey, Manic Street Preachers and 30 more hours of stuff I deem precious and share-worthy. Hopefully of use!
3. INSIDE THE DIGGERS
I am overjoyed to finally get to start sharing my San Francisco Diggers research/interviews with everybody. This is the first one:
In October 1966, Phyllis Willner arrived on motorcycle in San Francisco as a teenage Jewish runaway from Jamaica, Queens. She quickly fell in with the Hell’s Angels, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and, most crucially, the San Francisco Diggers, who were just getting their street radical thing together in the Haight-Ashbury.
The next two years would be eventful: many extraordinary highs, some really terrible lows.
Anyone familiar with the ’60s Counter-culture knows the key role the Diggers played in its birth and adolescence. They were often referred to as the worker-priests of Haight-Ashbury; San Francisco columnist (and Rolling Stone founding editor) Ralph J. Gleason famously called them “the executive branch of the hippie movement.” Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor said, “They [the Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
But who were the Diggers? Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan are the usual names associated with the group, as they’ve written books chronicling their participation in that era. But there were many other essential Diggers, like Phyllis Willner, whose stories — and unique, fascinating perspectives and insights — have never been told at length, or in any detail, in public.
With that in mind, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to share this conversation I had with Phyllis at her home in 2010. There has been some editing for clarity, but it has not been edited down for a general audience. My advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, you’ll like the next part.
Read the interview here: "For the Duration of Our Parallel Flow"