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Amoeba Music
This is where all the wack jobs hang outAmoeba Music, at 1855 Haight Street, is probably the most comprehensive music store in the whole wide world. They’ve got everything from old vinyl records to the latest rap-hip-hop-along Cassidy tweedle doodoo lala music. I didn’t think anyone used turntables anymore but apparently some people still dig’m, especially old schoolers and nostalgia grabbers. You can see these people poring over old vinyl LPs of Joan Baez, the Bee Gees, Kris Kristofferson, Mac Davis, Leo Sayer, Dan Fogelberg, the Gibson Brothers, Crosby Stills & Nash, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Neil Young of the old stuff, Neil Young grunge stuff, Neil Young in the pink Cadillac album, Olivia Newton-John, Kenny Rogers (The Gambler, not the baseball pitcher), Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Ronnie Milsap, Jerry Reed, Conway Twitty, Mel Tillis, The Carpenters, Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, Nils Lofgren, David Soul, Thin Lizzy, The Band, Three Dog Night, The Doobie Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Lawrence Welk, Lou Rawls, Boz Scaggs, Ricky Skaggs, Leif Garret, Shaun Cassidy (Da do run-run), Bay City Rollers, The Tubes, Greg Kihn, Kin Kinka Son, Eddie Money, Eddie Grant, Jackson Browne, Pat Benatar, Kim Carnes, Adam Ant, Kim Wilde, The Clash, Journey, The Four Seasons, Richie Valens (Para
710 Ashbury
Former home of The Grateful Dead Bailar La Bamba), Jose Feliciano, Freddy Frender, Ted Pendergrass, Kool and the Gang, The Commodores, Air Supply, The Little River Band, Fog Hat, Uriah Heep, The Stray Cats, Frankie Valli, Squeeze, Oingo Boingo, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Ramones, The Romantics, Dead Kennedys, Sex Pistols, Charlie Daniels Band, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Washington & Jefferson, Tesla, Rex Smith, Night Ranger, Slayer, Joan Jett, The Pretenders, Cheap Trick, Haircut 100, Dave Edmunds, Weather Report, Larry Carlton, Randy Newman, Danny Elfman, Kenny Loggins, Loggins & Messina, Donna Fargo, Donna Summers, Marilyn McCoo, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sonny & Cher, The Allman Brothers, Greg Allman, Herb Alpert, Joe Zawinul, Joe Jackson, Steely Dan, Tommy Tutone, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, Lindsay Buckingham, Triumph, Rush, Meat Loaf, Hall and Oates, Kiki Dee, Chicago, Spandau Ballet, Prince (or whatever he calls himself these days), Van Halen, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Neil Sedaka.
And that’s just a tenth of one percent of their vinyl collections. On top of that they have thousands more in the form of cassette tapes and compact discs. A vast collection of Jazz, R & B, Soul, Disco, Electronica, Rock, Hip-Hop, Blues, Bluegrass, International Music, Hawaiian Music, Cambodian Music, Laotian Music,
The Neighborhood
Streets are empty. Everyone is inside, doing their psychedelic gig Mongolian Music, French Rock, Canto Pop, ridiculous Chinese love songs, Swahili music, music from the Solomon Islands, Seychelles classics, Djibouti Rap records, Afghani music, Punk Rock, Devil music, Cannibal music, Euro fag music, and Burmese rock. You name it, it they got. There’s a diverse group of music aficionados hanging around the store too. I saw a black guy in African garb in deep colors of green, red and yellow, checking out some Vietnamese music. His Vietnamese wife was tagging along with him with their toddler. There was this other guy wearing a brown silk shirt with huge collars, bell bottoms and high heeled boots. He combed his hair straight down with Brylcreem. He looked something out of Saturday Night Fever.
The whacked out, the drugged out, the wannabes, the derelicts, the unwanted, the winos all congregate near the entrance of Amoeba Music. This is where the lunatic fringe begins. They are scattered throughout the Haight, hanging out in music stores, cannabis clubs, coffee shops, psychedelic bars, occult bookstores, vegetarian restaurants and abortion clinics. The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Center on Haight Street was created on the belief that health care is a right, not a privilege.
“It should A mosque in Frisco
At the corner of 26th and Geary be free at the point of delivery, and it should be comprehensive, nonjudgmental, demystified, and humane”.
This is what they advertise on their door step at the Happening House on Haight Street. It is in fact, their Mission Statement. These people are card-carrying Socialists. There is nothing wrong with free health care. I would love it. Unfortunately, we can’t afford free health care. We can’t even afford free food. The Communists have tried all of this before. It failed. So did a bunch of European countries bent on Marxism. They may enjoy better health benefits than the US but that doesn’t necessarily mean better quality. More competition means better quality and unfortunately that comes with a price. In other words it’s not free, so these people are living in a dream world. It is also curious that they include “nonjudgmental” in their Mission Statement. Nonjudgmental about what? Sickness and health by definition is suppose to be nonjudgmental, it doesn’t care about personalities, ideologies, political persuasion or sexual orientation, so it shouldn’t even be said, it goes without saying. I can understand “comprehensive”, meaning they will treat any disease or provide a comprehensive diagnosis that will leave no stones unturned.
The Drummers at The Golden Gate Park
Everyone jammin', and there's a lot dope smoking going on. “Demystified and humane” are mere trivialities, included to promote personal attention and care, to introduce a little humanity. But note that “comprehensive” is followed by “nonjudgmental”, perhaps because what they really mean by “comprehensive” is to include not only health related matters but other medical related matters that hinges on a moral (or immoral, depending on your persuasion) obligation, like abortion! Yes, indeed, the Haight Free Medical Clinic will perform abortion on demand, for free, at any phase of pregnancy, no questions asked, no parents’ permission required for the underage, and as stressed in their Mission Statement “free at the point of delivery”. Aren’t you shocked? Not me. This is Haight-Ashbury. They believe in this kind of counter-culturalism. I sort of enjoy the fact that they are adamant about it. These people are definitely out of their minds but that doesn’t stop from doing what they believe and that’s what makes this place so fascinating to me. Forget about the wannabes and the derelicts. The real residents of Haight are these truly whacky people lurking in the backgrounds going about their fantasies, a bunch of modern day Don Quixotes, fighting the windmill of improbability. They don’t make a show of it, they just go about their business doing it, handing out condoms on street corners, exchanging used needles for clean new ones to gay drug addicts in the Castro district, feeding the homeless, doing case work for welfare recipients, adopting young black youths in juvenile hall, inviting gang members to church events and fighting for the rights of sex offenders and pedophiles. So it’s not surprising too, that a large portion of people employed by the newspaper and entertainment industries are residents of Haight-Ashbury.
I must admit that it’s hard to write good things about the Haight these days because less interesting things are happening. The vibe is gone. Even the strip clubs have closed down. All it is now are a bunch of tourists taking pictures, nostalgia seekers gawking at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, so they can go back home to Missouri and tell their friends they’ve made the counter culture pilgrimage to Frisco.
“Here Marge, look here, see…I’m a rebel” one could imagine some old geezer saying to his friends in Wichita.
“Where are the freaks? I don’t see any freaks. I don’t know why we can’t any see any, there are suppose to be lots of them here” I heard an old lady complaining to her husband.
“Let’s go to that psychedelic store and buy some of them tie-dyed T-shirts for Carlotta and Imogene, honey” the husband said to his wife. The wife was still complaining about not seeing any freaks. What kind of freaks is she talking about?
“Frisco’s full of them, you just gotta know what kind you want. The homosexual kind. The drugged out kind. The homeless kind. The foreign kind. Just name and I’ll point it out to you” I wanted to say to this woman.
Haight counter-culture is strictly an American phenomenon. People of the baby boom generation who are now in their sixties are well aware of the things that happened here back in its heyday. They saw it on television. It looked dangerous then, so most stayed home and watched it on TV. It’s a tourist attraction now. They even have a walking tour showing points of interests that include the house where Charles Manson stayed for a brief period before he went back to Southern Cal and massacred a bunch of people. Most of the tourists, however, are Americans. There are some Europeans too who are hungry for some of that American style of counter-culturalism. You won’t see too many Japanese tourists in this place, only locals of Japanese descent.
At three o’clock in the afternoon a three piece band was playing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The lead singer and bassist is a grungy looking black guy with braids wearing mirrored Foster Grant sunglasses (there is no shortage of old school aficionados here), multicolored linen pants, a white shirt and a trench coat. He was playing his bass in that 70s funky style of pulling the high note string with his fingers and thumping the low note with his thumb, which makes that “Jing-thub” sound. He wasn’t really singing at all, just mumbling some ghetto words in the same style of John Lee Hooker;
Ba how how how how
Ba how how how how
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
he-yeah!
Let that boy boogie woogie
A little black girl was clapping, smiling and swaying side to side to the rhythm of the music. She might’ve been part of the attraction. The guitar player was another grungy looking dude, white, strumming a classic Fender with a disco influenced riff while the drummer, a fat white girl wearing a laced purple gown, kept the rhythm moving to a 3-4 beat. They sounded like a cross between Cool Jazz and Hard Rock Blues with the lead singer providing the blue note and the guy on the guitar providing a harmonious jazzy sound with some screeching transitions in between.
While the trio was playing I heard some screaming behind me. A commotion ensued but hardly anyone took notice because they were more interested in the band playing some funked up music. I turned around and saw, five feet away from me, a guy in his twenties with shaven head, no shirt, just shorts and tennis shoes, down on his knees and hands behind his head ready to be handcuffed by a cop with a thick mustache and a pilot’s sunglasses (Foster Grants). The cop was shoving his walking stick in the guy’s back while holding the top of his head, putting the guy in a humiliating and defenseless position, which was what the cop intended to do. But it seemed to me that all of this, though standard procedure for the cops, was unnecessary, because the guy looked like he was drugged out of his mind. He had that lazy, empty, zoned out look in his eyes, like the type you see in people on an acid trip. He was wobbling back and forth, could hardly hold his balance even though he was on his knees, almost ready to fall down. All of a sudden a gush of pinkish-cream colored thick fluid (not fully digested food) was heaved out of his mouth, puking his guts out on the pavement. The cop let him go. Now he was on all fours, spitting the last of what was in his stomach and dry heaving himself to death. After five minutes of what seemed like an agonizing experience the guy finally stopped barfing and sat right next to his own puddle of puke on the pavement. The cop grabbed his left arm. It was full of needle marks, little red tick marks all over. The cop checked his right arm. The same thing. The cop radioed for a patrol car. They were gonna take his ass down to the station. The guy was so fucked up that he didn’t even care. He was totally compliant. He even said thank you to the cop.
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James
non-member comment
Not a mosque.
This is not a mosque. See the big cross on the front and at the tops of the domes? It's a Russian Orthodox Church.