Nathan B. Spooner
Paul
Kantner, a founding member of the popular 1960s group, the Jefferson
Airplane, is reported to have stated, “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t
really there.”
That
phrase always appealed to me, even though my diploma from UC Berkeley is dated
1966. I did not attend my graduation and 20 years later I discovered that it
had been mailed to my parents home, I do have it now.
After
finishing at Cal, I hung around the edge of the music scene in the Bay Area,
living mainly in Berkeley and then briefly in the Haight Ashbury of San
Francisco. I even lived next door to the hippies for a while. They were kinda
fun in those days.
One
evening, late 1968 I believe, my friend Lo-Hwa and I were at a friends’ house
and someone said, “Hey, there’s a party in the City, want to go?”
We
all drove across the bay to the City. The residence was 2400 Fulton St., across
the street from the panhandle of Golden Gate Park.
I
remember walking into a large 3 story mansion. The front door opened to an
entrance foyer, just to the left an elevated area with someone playing an
electric keyboard, in the back side of the foyer, a staircase led to upper
rooms.
After
milling around a while and generally taking to people, my brother Joe nudged me
and said, “Hey, that guy on the stairs is pouring wine onto Maria” (she was
below the stairway).
I
could see my brother was not pleased and when the fellow started laughing, Joe
started up the stairway to confront the person. Some of the guy’s friends
intervened, escorted my brother back down and quite bluntly told us to leave,
which we did.
As
Joe and I were walking away he laughed and opened his jacket to show me the
bottle of Beaujolais wine he had liberated from the party.
The
following afternoon, back in Berkeley, my friend Lindsay asked me “Why did Paul
Kantner kick you guys out of the party?”
Turns
out the house was the residence of the Jefferson Airplane. I think Marty Balin
was the guy pouring wine on our friend Maria.
So anyway, even though
the phrase “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there” is often quoted
by the media and others, it doesn’t quite ring true for me.