[Landline] Maximum social joy and welfare through anarchism, guerrilla theater and LSD
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2. A GUIDING VISION: A conversation with PETER BERG of the San Francisco Diggers
I interviewed the late Peter Berg at his San Francisco home in November 2006 with David Hollander for a documentary film project. That's Peter pictured above, in a screengrab from a 1967 TV documentary.
Berg was reluctant to speak yet again about the Diggers — he had given many interviews through the years, and dreaded what he called “the 7s” — years ending in “7,” which always marked a numerically significant (10th, 20th, 30th, on and on) anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love and for him meant yet another round of fielding media asks for interviews about the Diggers’ role in the Haight-Ashbury scene.
In 2020, the Diggers are little-known. But in 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. “A cross between the Mad Bomber and Johnny Appleseed,” said future Yippie Paul Krassner in The Realist, “a combination of Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X, the illegitimate offspring resulting from the seduction of Mary Worth by an acidic anarchist.” The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
In the decades afterward, everyone wanted to interview Peter Berg because he had been there, he had done things, and most of all, because he had remained brilliant and charismatic, post-Diggers. Berg was a playwright-dramaturge and anarchist tactician who had a street sense, a sense of history and a sense of humor; a short, sometimes brusque guy with a big, creative, poetic mind who gave tremendous quotes.
Born in 1937 (another “7”), Berg was in his late 20s as the Haight-Ashbury “uprising,” as he called it, rolled into being in 1966. He was somewhat older than the drop-out “flower children” and teenage runaways of the time. He was also somewhat younger than the Haight-curious North Beach bohemian poets, painters and beatniks, most of whom were in their 30s and 40s. Having coined the term “guerrilla theater” during his productive time in the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe, Berg found his role in the Diggers, manifesting maximum social joy and welfare through a set of deceptively simple ideas whose range of application seemed boundless.
After many phone calls, emails, postcards and a shipment of Arthur No. 13 (the Pentagon exorcism oral history issue), David and I scored an audition with Berg to conduct an interview. Not long afterwards, on camera in his kitchen, Berg gave us — performed for us — one of the best, most comprehensive interviews regarding the Diggers that he ever did. He was on for two hours, and he knew it. I hope the following text, basically a transcript with extremely light editing for clarity, gets that across.
Berg died in 2011. Planet Drum, the San Francisco-based bioregionalist non-profit foundation he started with his wife (and fellow Digger) Judy Goldhaft in 1973, continues to the present. Berg’s contributions to bioregionalism were foundational and visionary; his work persisted across decades, and was a natural continuation of his Diggers work. Read more about Planet Drum here.
Read the interview with Peter Berg here: A GUIDING VISION: A conversation with PETER BERG of the San Francisco Diggers
This is the sixth interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. An interview with Judy Goldhaft on the Diggers era is forthcoming. For more information on the Diggers, consult Eric Noble’s vast archive at diggers.org
I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Fondly,
Jay Babcock
Joshua Tree, CA