tis time for Jeffrey Bayard McMeans' (fuzzy hat guy) yearly surreal tale of making history happen at the peak moment in music and hippie ideals.
June 25, 1967
You should have been there. Now I mean to take you to it, the sunny day when I look out the window in my houseboat in Sausalito that Sunday. I grab a cup of coffee and some toast but also bring a jacket and walk with purpose down the dock and jump in my car, get on Highway 101 south, drive up up up the Waldo Grade, zoom through the tunnel and explode into brilliance as the Golden Gate Bridge lays out before me. Once over it, I turn off on the 19th Avenue exit and then left on Fulton and make it down to Haight Street.
About 6 people are in the back office of the Psychedelic Shop as we are putting together a Free Concert that morning in the Panharndle of Golden Gate Park. It takes around 15 minutes to go over the details and then Jay Thelin, who runs the shop, asks if anyone has a car. I put up my hand and he tells me to go down to the Travelodge at Fisherman’s Wharf and pick up Jimi Hendrix and bring him to the gig site. That was the first time I knew that Jimi was on for today. Minutes later, driving over, I am real excited as it was just last Sunday that I stood in the left wing of the stage, not 10 feet from Jimi, when he blew our minds and lit our fire with his set at the Monterey Pop Festival. Now pulling into the parking lot at the hotel, I go to his door and knock. He opens the door and is standing there, all alone. No groupies or hangers-on yet in his life. Jimi grabs his guitar and we jump in my beat-up ’59 Studebaker ragtop and head over to the park. Along the way, he compliments me on my Russian fur hat. I had picked up an old fur in a thrift store and made it into this hat and I took it off and tried to give it to him. He said no, that it wouldn’t fit over his hair. We pulled up and stopped on Fell Street in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park and Jimi got out and walked over to the stage, a 2 and a half ton truck we had rented for the gig. I rolled a joint and took a few, quick puffs and jumped out and said to myself that since I had brought him to this gig that I was going to get as close as I could. I am sure glad Jimi didn’t want my fur hat as I look so good with it on, holding on to the microphone cord smiling and enjoying head-on this thrilling moment. I had no idea nor would I have cared that famed SF photographer Jim Marshall took a photo of this. We lived in the moment back then and after Jimi’s set, which of course, was fantastic, I went on with my life and never looked back. I eventually went to Woodstock and then drove a Hog Farm hippie bus all over America for a few years, jumped across the Atlantic on a 100 dollar flight to Europe and bummed around there for awhile, got hired on to a British hippie bus in June of ’72, taking people from Amsterdam, Holland to Kabul, Afghanistan (for 75 dollars full fare) and lived there for a spell (World’s best hashish) before going down to Goa, India and living in an 11 room house and a family to cook for (25 dollars a month) us as we lounged around the shores of The Arabian Sea and then I drove a VW van up to Kathmandu, Nepal and walked (they called it trekking) in the foothills of the Himalayas and really enjoyed my life. Eventually, in 1976, I came home to the USA, very appreciative to be an American and settled in the Bay Area. A lot of it was lived in Marin County, places like Bolinas and Lagunitas with outlaws of one sort or another.
Then one day 25 years after Jimi’s Free Concert, I found myself over at my friend Wrinkle’s house. He wasn’t there but his 18 year old son Austin was and since he played drums in a garage band, I told him the story of seeing Jimi and taking him to this gig long ago. It was the first time in my life I had ever told anyone about this experience although later, Austin told me he was bit skeptical of it actually happening. Anyway, the next day, Jameson Grant, Austin’s friend, hears the part about Jimi and this Davy Crockett coonskin hat, and tells Austin that he has a picture of Jimi and someone with a Davy Crockett hat on his head taken in San Francisco. They go over to his house and in a storage box pulls out this picture that he had cut out of a Guitar Magazine when he was 16 years old living near Omaha, Nebraska. Austin looks at it and exclaims “Dude; that‘s Jeff, my dad’s friend”. This was sometime in the early 90’s that I first laid eyes on this picture and since then, I have found it in Rolling Stone and many magazines and in books, too. I have always appreciated the part that Jameson and Austin played in bringing it to my attention and look back fondly on this day shared with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, early in The Summer of Love, 1967
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