Even If You Hate America...
You'll Love San Francisco
ABOVE: One of the many joys of San Francisco is the truly bizarre, over-the-top Victorian architecture that survived the 1906 earthquake. Contrary to my belief, not all the city was destroyed (and popular legend has it that a lot of the fires were insurance jobs. What survives is truly unique and the "bay window" style survives in much modern housing.
That's what they told me as I planned my first overseas trip to the city I had dreamed of visiting for thirty years. I have been to New Zealand but for all its special charms it is so like Australia it really doesn't count as "overseas". Now I was going overseas for real and in retrospect I don't know if what I found in three brief weeks was America... but I loved it.
Like most Australians I have a love/hate relationship with American culture: at its best it is dazzling, clever and totally beguiling - at its worst it can be ugly, crass and an insult to the intelligence of a retarded dog (like most popular cultures I guess - but most cultures aren't as all-pervasive). I have always suspected that American media portrays the nation as it thinks the nation wants to see itself rather than how it really is.
The fact is, most of the audience for and interest in my work is in America. From a purely business point of view, if I ever want to make an income from my work I have to acquire some sort of understanding of my market.
But that's not where the story starts. In 1967 I and four of my mates were running a little folk club in Hobart, my hometown, called The Five Believers (we were huge Dylan fans). One night, while I was annoying the folkies by presenting an all-electric blues band, in walks a young college graduate called Mark Rankin. Fresh from San Francisco via Antarctica he carried a flat top steel string Guild guitar and played the best finger-picking style any of us had ever heard.
From his backpack came more tapes and vinyl of what was to me the strangest and most exciting new music: Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, a set of John Fahey's Takoma label and Janis Joplin's first album with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Mark said he knew them all personally and described a city alive with music, culture, drugs and revolution.
In 1969 I had my fare and a place to stay... then the friends who had gone on ahead wrote to say the whole country was in a state of virtual civil war, that everywhere was violence and paranoia and that they were coming back to Australia as fast as they could. They sent me some books to demonstrate their point - some of which were seized by Customs but one that made it through was an account of the Berkeley riots over Peoples Park. The Summer of Love was over and I forgot about San Francisco.
Continue on the unauthorised San Francisco tour:
(1)
Home - (2)Sanfrancisco.com
- (3) Luver and Me - (4)Visit
the Tenderloin
(5) Peoples' Park - (6)
Land's End Beach - (7)
People's Park Today - (8)
The Innocent Arrives
(9) The Mural Culture -
(10) My exhibitions in SF - (11)
The Battle for San Francisco
(12) Victorian Architecture - (13) Return
to Travel Page