Literrata: The Human Be-In

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

The Human Be-In

I was at the Human Be-In with my mother, I was just turned 14, barely into my teens. It was a gloriously sunny, if cold day, and the grass was damp. There were flowers and candles, incense and feathers, cymbals and chimes—and lots of smoke.

Gary Snyder, in a fringed leather vest, was on stage chanting and reading poetry, Allen Ginsberg was standing behind him with Michael McClure dressed in black. Lenore Kandel. My first Beat poetry reading. (I later met, and read with all of them). It was a gathering of the tribes, and the wild tribe kept growing all afternoon, from a thousand souls to a crowd of 30,000 people converging on the polo fields, and the bands played on.

See the royal maze website that mentions John Cooke

Court jester Timothy Leary, all dressed in white, leaped off the stage, tumbled down among the masses, tripping down the main aisle like a pied piper, he spotted my mom, a tall willowy auburn-haired beauty, and bear-hugged her. They knew each other from before. It’s an Irish thing. She was always bringing the Irish poets home like Lew Welsh and Gene Ruggles. He solemnly shook my hand. And smiled beatifically.

Photo by Jim Marshall, from San Francisco Remembered. With thanks to Janet Duncan

As they twirled and hugged, she threw back her head and laughed, her long red mane combusted in the sunlight. I’d never seen her so radiant as in that moment. She was like another person, not depressed. She said, God bless you Timothy Leary, he laughed and drifted onward toward the back of the crowd, creating hives of excitement whenever he stopped. Jerry Garcia was onto a long guitar riff. Bubbles danced in the breeze. Me, awkwardly standing there in soggy rain-soaked pants, taking it all in, never dreaming I’d one day become a writer.

Big Brother and Janis Joplin lived down the road from us in Forest Knolls, Sons of Champlain, Jefferson Starship, Grateful Dead, and Carlos Santana also lived in the San Geronimo Valley so the musicians were all neighbors of sorts. I later met most of them hitching back and forth to high school. My mom took it up a notch, sometimes she took me in tow when she partied with them.

San Francisco, January 1967, was an electrifying year of social deconstruction and reconfiguration. The Gathering of the Tribes where spiritual generation amassed for a Human Be-In at the Polo Fields. Guest speakers Ram Dass and Timothy Leary spoke to some 10,000 very stoned pilgrims who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out en masse.

And yes, there really was a psychedelic poster. I remember it. Someone said that if a poster had the year on it, then it was fake. Whether this one is real, is moot. The point is, we were there.