Rock 'n Roll Fantasies

As you probably know, I once was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. My stories appeared from 1974 to 1977; later on I had another assignment, but I didn't deliver on it. I can no longer remember what the story was, exactly, but it was an investigative piece that some colleagues and I were pursuing from the Center for Investigative Reporting, the non-profit organization I co-founded after I parted ways with Rolling Stone in 1977.

Saturday nights are always weird for me. One of the strangest in my memory was back when I was on staff at the magazine, and my partner Howard Kohn and I had published the first of our stories about the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst; called "The Inside Story."

My boss, the irrepressible Jann Wenner, lived in a Victorian mansion on California Street in those years. He had a bunch of us over for the evening -- a night that was laced with drugs and alcohol. Jann had an early version of a large-screen TV, and we all watched a new show called Saturday Night Live. It featured something never before aired by network TV -- fake ads, and I remember that Jerry Rubin was in one of them.

I'd known Jerry for several years, since my SunDance days, and in fact I'd edited a book of his, "Growing Up at 37," I think it was called. Through a drug and alcohol induced haze, we watched the show and to our delight, Howard and I were mentioned as some sort of off-screen characters -- those two guys from Rolling Stone.

Annie Liebowitz was there, and late in the night she broke into tears as she discovered her cameras had been stolen out of her car parked in Jann's driveway.

A few years earlier, all of the antiques Alison and I had brought back from Afghanistan had been stolen out of our van parked in an alley right near where Jann lived. I'd wandered through the pawnshops of the Fillmore for weeks but I never found our lost items.

Annie never got her cameras back, either, but Jann just bought her new ones.

***

Jerry Rubin, meanwhile, transformed himself from Yippie to investment banker -- one of the more remarkable transformations people I knew made as the collective '60s died away and the greedy '80s emerged. Later still, Jerry was killed trying to race across a street in LA one night. Two other friends of mine were with him when it happened. They didn't dart out, he did. He died instantly.

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One of my other blogs (I've got about six) is Sidewalk Images. I just had to post the photo at the top of this blog tonight because my ten-year-old Dylan shot it earlier today. You can see his camo shoes and camo pants. You can't see his wool Russian Red Army Cossack hat that he wears even on a hot day like today -- with temperatures in excess of 80 degrees, even after the sun set.

Yes, it's hot here, the kind of October weather old-timers call earthquake weather. Of course, Loma Prieta happened this month in 1989. And the terrible East Bay fire happened in this month as well, a few years later. My friend Dierdre English lost everything in that fire, as did many other writers, including Margaret Hong-Kingston. I was at a party where people gave Hong-Kingston copies of her books that they had, since she no longer had any of her own.

***

A Pink Floyd concert is playing tonight on a local public television station. It's another Saturday night, and as usual I am alone. Except for the four kids sleeping in the other room. I remember how nice it was to watch concerts like this one with somebody by my side.

It's so hot tonight in this city. It's unreal. Maybe the grass in my yard knows something I don't know.


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