INTRODUCTION
 HIS JOURNAL will contain stories of my
encounters with some “famous” people, a few of them considered notorious -
one, in particular, went from being a professor to a convicted felon, although not
for any violent crime. In the process, we - you, my readers, and I, your humble
cyber-servant, might consider the very nature of FAME and notoriety, as the
days pass. Here's a link to a meandering musical meditation on the Shadows of FAME. The
fellow who became the felon, is/was Doctor Timothy Leary, who rose from an
obscure academic career to the heights of notoreity with his experimental work
with the powerful pyschotropic chemical D-Lysergic Acid Di-ethylamide-2,5, both
legimate and illegally. My encounter was in the early months of 1968. It's called
DID YOU FEEL THAT?Also, meet a very obscure dancer, known one memorable night in the early seventies as OXOXO, as he Dances with the DEAD. given by the Singing Rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach. He tells you his tale of Shlomo's blessings in Rare Vintage These
days, it is necessary to distinguish fame from legendary. People might
become legendary in the older sense of the term, before any modern electronic
media or even the printing press, and not be famous at all, in the modern meaning
of the term. I guess that means People magazine, or Jay Leno making jokes about
you...my old friend Luke was legendary in this sense. Known and beloved among the
people he personally encountered, but not tabloid fare...In the olden day people
would spin yarns, make up exploit songs about folks like Luke. You can visit the
Cyber Cafe right now to read up on Luke. With his help, I became the inventor of
Subway Surfing. Use your browser's Back
button to return here.“Hey! Bobbie!!”  ACK ON the last Friday of March, l968, I was
living in and around Tucson,
Arizona. Some of these times are recalled in my tales of Legendary Luke. One of the
members of the "hippie" tribe I with which I was "running", had come back to the
house we lived in with a bag full of glass beads and gut or nylon string on which
to put them. At first I not at all interested in stringing beads, but then I
realized Hedwig (a pseudonym) was capitalizing a cottage industry for us. So, I
thought I'd put some beads together with the idea of selling them on the Arizona
University campus. It just so happened that Robert F. Kennedy was making a
Presidential primary campaign speech there, that afternoon. The advance people had
purposely chosen a building where an overflow crowd would result. By the time I
got there, the press entourage and several hundred people were milling around the
plaza in front of the Hall.Personally,
at the time I felt quite alienated from the political process, as if I were an
exile in the land of my birth. From his previous associations in
government in the fifties, I didn't quite trust Bobbie Kennedy. Although, on a
personal level, it was hard not to like the youthful, vigorous brothers from
Massachusetts, who were bucking the tide of old-line political thinking...or so it
seemed. So, my feelings were mixed that day. People were getting more and more
skeptical of the Johnson adminstration policy in Southeast Asia. It was beginning
to be more than "freaks" and "leftists" opposed to the war in Vietnam, which never
was a "declared" war...With
so much attention focused on the doorway to the hall among the crowd, I
quickly realized I wouldn't be selling any hippie necklace that day...Then there
a stir of excitement in the crowd, and Kennedy's party was standing on the steps
leading to the portico of the building. Instead of proceeding to the open
limosines parked near me, Kennedy proceeded to give about a ten minute precis
of the longer speech he'd given inside. He had declared his oppostion to Johnson's
policy! I was amazed by the spirit of attempted conciliation in the tone of his
voice. It felt to me like Bobbie had done some soul searching and was
courageously "sticking his neck out".Then
as the crowd roared approval, Kennedy's party made it's way toward the
limosines. Any security that was present was strictly personal - not Secret
Service. The instant I realized Kennedy was headed toward the car I was pressed up
against, I found myself shouting, "Hey! Bobbie!!" as he stepped into the
convertible limo. What followed was as much of a movie I was watching as it was an
event in which I had become a participant...Kennedy immediately looked in my
direction and shouted, "Hey! What?" in the same familiar tone of voice -
almost like I was the quarterback in a game of touch football, and I noticed he
was "open".He saw
me remove the glass bead necklace with one hand, and in a smooth athletic
fashion scrambled on hands and knees up over the back deck of the limo to reach
down to take the necklace from my extended hand. As smoothly as before, he
returned to the rear seat and was staying with both arms extended with the Peace
sign gesture that Nixon would expropriate by the fall...Kennedy had put the
necklace around his neck by the time he was standing up! The whole thing went by
as quickly as a newsreel clip - as if a director had said, "This has got to be
a one take scene, so relax and wing it..."The
entourage drove off. I was left with a personal connection to a tragic figure
in American public life. It had been the first contact I'd had with someone who
had that grace that gets called charisma. Many of us experience these moments,
some of us even get to be the charismatic one for fifteen minutes or so, and years
later people tell US how much those few moments meant to them. And so the
fabric of humanity weaves a tale... |
There's one in Every Famous Life...
 N THE BACKGROUND, or early formative years,
every Kid from Hibbing
has their David Whitaker...Whitaker being a bohemian beat poet in "Dinkytown" -
the "boho" quarter of Minneapolis just across the Mississippi River from the St.
Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. Scaduto's biography of Bob Dylan
mentions him as an early influence on the enigmatic "song and dance man" from the
Mesabi range town of Hibbing. I would finally see some of those haunts in the
summer of 1988, the one time I got as far north as Minneapolis. By that time, I'd
had my own encounters with "Rainbow Dave" as he came to call himself the time I
saw him in Atlanta, later that same terribly dry summer of '88. What happened as I
played David my Shadows of Fame epic will be revealed
here soon. So come back to this page for the saga of synchronicity as it
unfolds...The
years
time between December 1978 and December 1979 was a time of much travel
for me. At the end of '78, with the help of a relocated native Bloomingtonian, I
moved to San Francisco, and became a part of the San Francisco Folk Music Club.
Yet, '79 found me back in the midwest and even the East Coast. While in Manhattan,
I played the open mike at Gerde's Folk City, a place where many
singer-songwriter's got exposure in NYC. Met a tall lanky hopeful who called
himself Rider...yet, by early fall, I was back in San Francisco, working as a bike
messenger for a blueprint shop.One
weekend
Pete Seeger, who travelled with Woody Guthrie when Woody was still
capable, was giving a free concert in an outdoor performance arena called Stern
Grove. I had to make a few transfers on SF buses, and was leaning on my upright
hard shell guitar case as I waited for the last connection to Stern Grove. A short
fellow with "granny" glasses and a rainbow knit west african skullcap appeared out
of the crowd. You going to play with Pete today? he said. He had an air of
knowledge about him that was palpable...Well, no, I hadn't planned on
it, I said, but..."one does never know, do one?" I flashed on did Duke
Ellington say that? My inquirer was amused, said his name was David Whitaker and
asked me my name. I told him. Then he got a bright look on his face and asked if
I'd read Athony Scaduto's biography of Bob Dylan. Before I could finish telling
him I had, but that it had been a while since I did, David interrupted me and
said, You can go to a bookstore and check this out if you want, but I'm the
David Whitaker that turned Dylan on to my Woody Guthrie record collection back in
Minneapolis...The
conversation
turned to where I'd been lately. I told him I'd been back in NYC
and mentioned Gerde's Folk City. He got excited and asked if I'd seen or heard of
a young fellow named Rider...When I told him I did, he turned to his lady friend
and said, this guy knows Rider...he's gotten to New York - I knew there was a
reason I should speak to you, Jesse!So, I
visited him and his lady friend where they lived in Haight-Ashbury a few
times, and got a picture of how things were in the latter days of the Beat Era.
David liked the rewrite of "You
Ain't Going Nowhere" a country-rock ditty
that the BYRDS made famous on their Sweetheart of the Rodeo
album. My version goes like this:You still ain't going nowhere Buy me a lute/and a jester's suit/Those dumb galoots are in cahoots/Jump over it all in seven league boots You still ain't going nowhere Give me a coat/and a bottle of rum/I'll play the part of the bowery bum/Work like a dog 'til kingdom come You still ain't going nowhere Listen to Zeke, the idiot, speak/The odds get better, every week/But even when you reach the top of the peak the rock rolls back down again... The chorus remains, the same. David
was
DJ-ing a music program on a small FM station that could hardly be heard
outside of San Francisco at the time, he gave me a chance to appear live, but I
never got the chance - world oil politics intervened...The Iran Hostage crisis
developed. I was residing in a residence club at the Hotel Balmoral on Bush street
in SF. It was basically a pensioner in the European style, with a smattering of
workers like bike messengers to fill out the roster.That night
it was
reported a businessman in Denver, Colorado had shot a few teenagers who were
trespassing on his property to harass him because he was "one of them
ayatollah
guys", a fellow resident began muttering ugly racist stuff about the guy - an
opponent of Khomeini's regime and therefore an exile and refugee. I had watched
her watch the stating of the same information I've typed here - when I attempted
to point this out she began screaming at me - I raised my voice for emphasis, she
went to the concierge and accused me of starting a fight! The concierge sided with
the woman, didn't cut me any slack, and told me to leave ASAP. What could I
do?I
called
Greyhound. They had a cheap ticket offer. I thought about returning to
Indiana. I had enough money saved up that I'd be able to relocate, but the
earliest I could leave was the next day...so I called David Whitaker, told him
the circumstances - he agreed to couch me for just one night. The next day I was
headed east, 'dust yer heels' is all you can do sometimes. I wouldn't see David
again until the latter half of the eighties. |
You can now continue with
the Saga of Synchronicity
