[Landline] Inside the criminal glamour of the San Francisco Diggers with Kent Minault
1. WHAT THIS IS
Landline is a free, to-the-point email, sent by me every once in a while to a list of 4,000 (!) subscribers. Irregular epistles intended for friends, colleagues, Arthur Magazine heads, pastoral people, dharma nuts, Democratic Party get-out-the-voters and other curious sweetfolk, made up of ideas, nudge and announcements that hopefully form a small bailiwick outside the unceasing current of cruddiness. An archive of previous Landlines exists here.
2. MUSIC I AM ENJOYING LISTENING TO AT THIS TIME, IN THIS PLACE I maintain a Spotify playlist for convenience and easy kicks. 15 hours of music is way too hard to sequence on this app, so some of the transitions may be jarring. Or pleasing! Who knows. Right now it's got Vytas Brenner, John Martyn, new Mosses (featuring Ryan Jewell), new Matt LaJoie, new Elkhorn, Joni, Francis Bebey, new Lewsberg, new Rose City Band (Ripley from Wooden Shjips in country-psych boots), new Rolling Blackouts C.F., a new Arbouretum smoker, Devendra remixed by Helado Negro, lotsa '70s Tim Maia, Espers covering Blue Oyster Cult, new Endless Boogie, new Tony Allen/Hugh Masekela collab, new Six Organs of Admittance, lots of solo Tim Bernardes and his band O Terno and on and on into the far distance. Enjoy or don't!
3. INSIDE THE SAN FRANCISCO DIGGERS, PART III It's been a large charge indeed to finally start sharing my San Francisco Diggers research/interviews with everybody via my Diggers Docs blog. This is the third one, an in-depth (17,000 words!) conversation with Kent Minault, the acid-fueled street anarchists' (informal) chief of operations, pictured below in 1968...
The Diggers were meant to be loose, free and vaguely anonymous—or pseudonymous—but perhaps inevitably, some people’s names got out. Usually they were the ones who spoke to a reporter.
And there were a lot of reporters in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district during the Diggers’ heyday of 1966-8. Such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight — even, memorably, a typically dyspeptic Joan Didion, for the Saturday Evening Post—included the Diggers in their account.
“A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. The 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.” Didion herself wrote, “In the official District mythology, [the Diggers] are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand.”
So who were these guys? Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan are the usual names associated with the Diggers (and their later incarnation, sometimes called the Free Family collective), as they wrote books chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio (1972) is the most notorious. But there were many others who participated in the various wildly audacious Digger initiatives of the time.
When David Hollander and I interviewed Kent Minault at his Los Angeles home in 2006 for a documentary film, it was the first time he had spoken on the record, at length, about his time with the Diggers. He had a lot to say — and, as a veteran stage actor and all-around learned fellow, a wonderfully theatrical way of saying it. Details, color, context, insight: it’s all here in Kent’s vivid storytelling.
The conversation with Kent has not been edited down for a general audience, and many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. There are, inevitably, a few digressions. As usual, my advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, there’s a good chance you’ll like the next part.
Read the interview here: “We're gonna do economic activity—without money!": Inside the criminal glamour of the San Francisco Diggers with Kent Minault