The Dark Side of the Moon

The sixties was not all flower power. Woodstock became Altamont, and I was often afraid.

NOTE: The audio of the episode contains music and media clips, for the fuller

experience. The written essay has been edited.

Episode 04

I am having a nightmare, and I struggle to open my eyes to escape, but it doesn’t work. The sky is darkening, and the air is thick with an imminent threat. A woman next to me says, “It’s not so bad if you lie flat. The planes miss us then.” I’m a time traveler wandering through periods of history and now, it’s the 1960s. I am with a crowd of people. We seem to be in a commune, and we are living in Cambodia. I begin to recognize people. I see Marshall and then Alan Ginsberg approaches me and vaccinates me with a huge dose of LSD. “I’m not ready for this yet!” I protest.

I ask questions; “Why do you all sit facing the same direction instead of like a living room?” They asked me, “How did this all happen?” As if I’m a seer because I’m from the future. “What about peace?” I shout as we drive around a battered city. “What happened to wanting that?”

I struggle to wake myself up, but a small, barefoot girl in a long flowery dress reaches for my hand and whispers to me, “Please don’t leave yet.”

For all its nightmarish dystopian imagery, I wasn’t surprised by some of the details of this dream; communes, LSD, Alan Ginsberg and my friend Marshall. It seemed like all my dreams lately were about the past and about Louis and the ten days we spent in Newark. I’m trying to make sense of a time that was still so haunting to me.

This dream of time travel took me back to an even earlier part of my childhood, of watching the movie The Time Machine, one amazing scene had always stuck with me. The Victorian inventor starts up his machine for the first time with what looks to be a big glass doorknob. The machine remains stationary. It’s the world around it that begins to move and there is this view outside the window of a clothing store across the street. The fashions on the display mannequin in the storefront keep changing. Hats come and go, hemlines go up and down. It’s like a flipbook of styles throughout the decades.

I didn’t have a time machine of course or a magical glass doorknob, but I went into the basement for the few pieces of clothing I had saved from the 1960s; a suede purple vest with embroidered stars, a reversible velvet hat with a long tail down the back. The vest was way too tight under the arms when I put it on, but the hat still fit.

I went back upstairs, put on some Country Joe and The Fish, sat at the computer still wearing my purple hat and started checking out TV guide listings from 1967. I spotted Coronet Blue. I remember the star, handsome, blond Frank Converse. It was a show about a guy with amnesia. He could only remember two words; “coronet blue,” and he was on this desperate search for clues about his past. The episode I found was a silly and sanitized take on student rebellion on college campuses starring a very young Jon Voight as a student activist.

The Fugitive was the show that Louis, Gary and I watched during our ten days.

We had all eagerly watched the finale of the show which aired on August 29^th 1967.

Louis was leaving the next week for college.

My husband tracked down the two-part finale and we sat down to watch it together. I didn’t know if my husband knew about the final twist, but I knew what was coming. Lieutenant Gerard was going to be revealed to be the killer.

I was shocked! There was no trick ending! The one-armed man was the killer. I had it wrong, which was very disorienting. I had thought there was one thing at least that had lodged in my brain as fact, but there it was, the video was undeniable.

My daily music ritual in those days started in the mornings before showering, before breakfast, before anything. Barely awake, I would choose an album to start the day. I could create an instant atmosphere with one drop of the needle and back then, we were all not just listening, everyone wanted to learn to play guitar, autoharp and mandolin, including me. Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Bob Dylan. I wondered if I remembered any of the songs. My old guitar was in the closet. The case was threadbare and worn. I took the guitar out and started noodling around. I’ve had this guitar since I was 14, a classical K with nylon strings. There is a faded mark on the body of it where I had glued on a blue star. The star was gone, but my original pink paisley thumb pick was still in the case. I always found the guitar a little difficult to play because it had such a wide neck.

I feel very depressed because up until some years ago I remembered how to do this. I remembered a number of songs that I would play, but I can’t make my fingers bring back the memory. I didn’t think they would ever go away. Damn it! It’s terrible! It’s like losing the memory in your body like you just became completely incompetent. There is a song that Marshall wrote, a little riff. It would be impossible to remember. Maybe he would remember.

I called my friend Marshall and asked about our playing guitars together back then and who he was listening to in those days.

BK: When did you start to play guitar?

M: Oh, I was probably 15.

BK: What kind of guitar did you have?

M: It was a little acoustic. The main thing I remember about it is that at some point, I painted it the colors of the Viet Cong flag.

BK: [laughs] I’m sorry.

M: I did. Half was red, half was blue and then there was a yellow star in the middle.

BK: Wow, signs of radicalism to come.

M: No, by then I was already a radical! That was after I started the Weequahic SDS Chapter [Students for a Democratic Society].

BK: Oh, you’re the one.

M: A bunch of us started it together.

BK: Who taught you to play? Did you teach yourself? What kinds of songs did you learn right away?

M: I just bought chord charts and started practicing chords and then started playing stuff.

BK: You don’t remember songwriters whose songs who wanted to sing?

M: Oh sure! Oh yes, I remember what I was listening to at the time. I think I was listening to a lot of country blues. I was listening to Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Lemon Jefferson and "Lightnin'" Hopkins. Then of course there was the white folk music; Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eric Andersen, Patrick Sky. Then I got into Doc Watson, and I learned some Doc Watson finger-picking pieces. Dave Van Ronk, I listened to a lot of his music and played some of his pieces. I learned “Come Back Baby.” I learned how to finger-pick “Come Back Baby.” I still can play it. I don’t play it a lot, so I don’t play it well.

Eventually I played the mystery riff for him, hoping it might spark a memory.

BK: Memory is coming in dribs and drabs, but I’m going to play you the little tiny fragment and you can tell me whether it triggers anything.

M: Okay.

M: Well, I’ll tell you two things. First of all, that did not sound half bad at all.

BK: That didn’t sound bad? [laughs]

M: I’m being serious. That did not sound bad. That sounded like a guitar player playing a little riff on the guitar. I did not write that nor did I teach it to you. Oh god, I wish we weren’t on different coasts.

BK: I agree. We would work on these pieces together!

M: I know! It would be so much fun getting together and making music.

BK: Oh please, it would be incredible!

BK: I’ll let you get back to your life, Marshall.

M: This is my life!

After I hung up with Marshall, I picked up my guitar and kept strumming. Although I had been trying to retrieve more memories of the actual ten days in the Summer of 1967, I hadn’t gotten quite as many as I had hoped. I still didn’t know why my parents let me stay away so long, how I got back and forth to Newark and where we were staying.

Marshall had one conviction, Louis had another. I still wasn’t sure. I started to form the chords for Richard and Mimi Farina's [Mainline Prosperity Blues lyrics] “Good morning, teaspoon,” a song about cocaine. As I started to sing the lyric, “Give me back my brain,” I got a familiar, uneasy feeling and I needed to stop.

Concert footage was still on the TV. “Please turn that off. Please. Please turn it off.” It was a woozy feeling, a physical one, a feeling of dread that brought me back to a time of too much happening too soon, too fast, of things spinning out of control.

I remember being at a Jefferson Airplane concert in Boston in the Fall of 1969. Just a few months prior, the band had played at Woodstock, the epitome of what the peace and love movement represented.

Four months later, the Airplane played along with Rolling Stones at a concert in Altamont that turned dark and ugly with an audience member being killed.

At the Boston show, I’m sure I was stoned, as was most of the crowd. The band was very fired up, defiant, singing [Volunteers] “Now it's time for you and me. Got a revolution.” Suddenly, a dancer came out from the wings proudly marching across the stage, stomping. She was virtually naked wearing just a see-through American flag. It was exciting. I had never seen anything quite like it before. Now it seemed like anything could happen and I felt afraid. Would everyone wind up on the stage naked? How would it all go? I remember telling myself, “Be cool, be cool.”

Although I had misremembered the ending of The Fugitive TV show, one memory had always been clear and painfully accurate. A few days after that last episode, Louis left for college and I was devastated. Gary retreated back to his darkroom and I returned home to my senior year in Fords, New Jersey. We all dispersed. Our idyllic time together had ended.

Even though Louis and I promised to write and visit, I was dreading our separation, but I told myself the same thing I did often in those years that followed; “be cool, be cool.”

There are two more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk