Haight Street

Long, slow, winding music on a stringed instrument you may not have heard before.

this is the psychedelic shop on haight street between ashbury and clayton two brothers opened it ron and j theelin on the third day of the year the band moved into seven hundred ten they had spent the weeks from thanksgiving to new year down there every day getting it ready they glued the burlap bags to the walls a friend named marcia made the lamp-shades they worked out where to get books and records and they stocked it with what they themselves were reading and hearing john coltrane archie shep ravi shankar books on mysticism and spiritual practice on thibet and the tao and the christian mystics little statues, necklaces, posters, incense, rolling papers.

Jay remembered it as pretty austere at the start.

Then they listened to their customers and took suggestions, and the bells arrived, and the Indian paisley fabrics.

One of their tenants was a painter, and they hung his paintings.

Another was a photographer, and they showed her pictures, for dessert, as they put it.

they sold the new authorized edition of the lord of the rings which everybody seemed to be reading that year but the real thing the shop offered was free people came in to talk to ask questions to find out what was going on and who was doing it and where in the end one history says the shop was a community center and its most important stock was knowledge and conversation and advice none of which cost a penny a graduate student walked past it one day and decided the neighborhood needed somewhere even more comfortable to sit and talk and he opened a coffee-house down the street the brothers had come to it by an unexpected road they were students at san francisco state and they spent their summers up at lake tahoe parking cars and renting out boats until they had saved enough to buy a big old victorian of their own on clayton street jay went to a lecture on campus one autumn by timothy leary's colleague richard alpert and came out transfixed by an idea about consciousness a few weeks later the brothers were gluing burlap to a wall here's the part that makes no sense the two young men who opened the store that came to stand for a great many people for the whole hate had been raised about as squarely as two boys could be they were eagle scouts ron cheerfully admitted he had voted for richard nixon for governor And their father had once managed a store on the very same street, The Woolworth's, the dime store on Haight Street.

One generation sold thread and goldfish and lunch-counter coffee on that block, And the next one sold incense and Ravi Shankar a few doors along.

That's the document, now the room.

The Strait Theatre was an old movie house on Haight Street, and in the autumn of the Summer of Love it was having trouble with the city.

The owners couldn't get a dance permit, so for a while they called the shows dance classes instead and the city wasn't sure what to do about that either inside it was big and dark and the sound system was so powerful that to micky hart standing out in the crowd everything washed together You could hear the bass and you could hear Jerry.

You couldn't hear the vocals.

Was it really two hours, one song stretching across a whole night? Or did it only feel that way to a young man who had just found the thing he was looking for? The old movie house is dark now.

The borrowed drum kit has been driven back to the friend's house and carried inside.

Out on Haight Street the late buses go by.

half empty, their windows glowing yellow, and the sidewalk outside the strait is wet and still under the streetlights.

I found my lane, but I really didn't know a lot about them even though they were out there.

Since I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we always knew about like, what's going on on Haight Street and the...

And of course you're used to all that stuff and it's fun and you're totally open to it.

But I hadn't put it all together about the sexual elements and what's going on with people until I started [laughs] to dig in as an adult.

But yeah, kind of too bad that Admiral couldn't hold on.

Interestingly, Admiral was started by one of the guys who had run Magnolia Brewing on Haight Street.

And I think a different... guy from Magnolia is actually opening a brewery in San Rosal right down the road from me very, very soon, which I'm incredibly excited about because I quite liked Magnolia.

So there are a lot of negatives, a lot of positives.

... by Iggy on Haight.

I got it on Haight Street-

Oh

...

...

I grew up around that shit too, just, like, Haight Street-

Yeah

... and punk rock fools.

Check it.

I gotta go out to Haight Street.

Huh.

What kind of neighborhood is it out there?