[Landline] No Mythologizing Here
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 3,900 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. An archive of previous Landlines exists here.
2. MUSIC FROM SOME OTHER EAR Latest additions on my Spotify playlist include new Steve Gunn, new Meat Puppets, previously unreleased JJ Cale, new Hama, and vintage work from Marvin Gaye, Joe Bethancourt (h/t Avant Ghetto), the Incredible String Band, Smetana, Redd Kross, and many others. It's over 30 hours of music, sourced from all over the garden. Hopefully of use!
3. INSIDE THE DIGGERS, PART II It's been the proverbial real gas to finally start sharing my San Francisco Diggers research/interviews with everybody over the last few weeks via my new Diggers Docs blog. The first interview, with Phyllis Willner, generated a massive response from Landline readers, which was very gratifying for me (and, I think, for Phyllis). This is the second one. It's got some tough stuff in it...
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. Didion 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. But there were many others who remained anonymous while participating in the various wildly audacious Digger initiatives of the time.
One of them is a man named Chuck Gould, pictured above.
Prior to interviewing Chuck in 2010, I didn’t know much about him, other than his name was the photographer credit for the bulk of the rather striking black-and-white photographs featured in Coyote’s memoir. In conversation I found Chuck’s avuncular outspokenness, street lawyerly bluntness, and Buddhist bottom-lineness to be as striking, refreshing and vivid as his photographic portraiture. No mythologizing here; just facts, laughs and tough reckonings...
"We were trying to empower people with their innate own power. Although we might not have articulated it precisely that way, but I mean, you go down the street on the back of a Hell’s Angel motorcycle, throwing handfuls of dimes in the air: this has an impact on people. It does, you know it does. You can get up and have a rally against money but probably everything you hear will be the wrong message. ‘Well, they’ve got too much money, we want some of their money.' This would be the message. Our message would be, We don’t want any of that shit at all. No one should have any money anyway! It’s the wrong medium of exchange. But free money? That had power. That said everything you needed to know about money in a corrupt society."
The interview text 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: “The Do was the thing”