Tag Archives: Hippies

Another Side of Bob Dylan, Victor Maymudes (Co-written and Edited by Jacob Maymudes)

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Subtitled ‘A Personal History on the Road and off the Tracks,’ and found by happenstance in a used-book store, this is a bit of marketing, in that it’s real subject is not Dylan at all, but Victor Maymudes, a longtime roadie and tour manager for Dylan, who spoke much of the text into a tape recorder in anticipation of a memoir he did not live to write.  Son Jacob (intriguing note: Dylan also has a son by that name) found the tapes after nearly every other possession or memento of his father had been destroyed in a fire, and put together this volume out of loyalty, respect and love.  Intertwining his own recollections, he added also quite a bit of explanation regarding the drifting apart that separated Maymudes from Dylan for years, how they came back together and how they fell-out again, more deeply and permanently, superficially due to business issues touching upon Jacob and his sister, but really thanks to Dylan’s own mercurial and dictatorial personality.  End result, the title is a deliberate misdirection but – as no doubt intended – induced me to pick up and read a book I’d likely not have been interested in if it had been titled more accurately.

Part rock/pop music hagiography, part social history of the sixties, part family paean, what resulted is an oddity but worth the reading.  Maymudes is interesting and unique, his journey intermittently exciting and at other times reflective.  The glimpses of Dylan depict savantic brilliance within the realm of music and songwriting coupled with a chilling inability to understand, consider or forgive those close to him.    As if, being so successful on his own terms at the one or two things he believes matter, he can barely spare a moment or a thought for anyone who is not equally blessed.  This seems confirmed by scenes of his collaboration with other musicians whom Dylan found satisfactory to his craft’s needs and so deigned to treat in a more-humane manner.

A dual portrait then, of two very different characters, their colorful journey and the tragic end of their always-unequal friendship over misunderstandings and slights that by rights should have been, given Dylan’s extraordinary wealth and independence, inconsequential.  Obscure and oddball, but definitely worth holding onto once you’ve come across it.

(Another note: Treehorn Books, Santa Rosa CA, is all a paper-hound could ask for.  Narrow aisles, shelves piled high, well-categorized and welcoming.  Stopped in for the first time to see if they had any G. B. Shaw for a birthday gift and found the perfect Collected Prose; inches thick, hard cover, great condition including library-style plastic over the dust-cover.   I will be back…)

Owsley and Me, Rhoney Gissen Stanley with Tom Davis

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Propelled by the excitement of the times and place – mid to late 1960’s San Francisco, this memoir of life in the Grateful dead family is a quick and fascinating read. Like more than a few other members of that scene, Rhoney Gissen came from wealth and dysfunction, and found in the hippie movement a refuge from the former, but not necessarily the latter. Her relationship with August Owsley Stanley III, better known as ‘The Bear,’ and later just Owsley Stanley, was very different from that with her parents, but no more healthy. It is a credit to Rhoney’s character that she not only survived, but overcame that treatment, to raise an apparently healthy and productive son (with the charmingly period-appropriate name of Starfinder Stanley.

Besides affording an entertaining travelogue, and a devastating portrait of the rampant misogyny of the movement (including the Dead, contrary to their counter-cultural reputation), this is Owsley’s story; the self-driven and self-centered genius who simultaneously revolutionized the recreational drug industry and the state of sound-system art while rubbing elbows and other body parts with a who’s who of psychedelic rock celebrities. Hendrix, Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Elvin Bishop, the Stones and the Beatles all make appearances, as do Bill Graham, Melvin Belli and many more. Seeing them from inside the movement puts lots of new spin on peace, love and freedom (which seems a better way to complete the trio than ‘happiness,’ given the bad trips, legal troubles, poverty and heartbreak we see).  The detailed accounts of Stanley’s LSD manufacturing are perhaps the most eye-opening part of the book; to paraphrase our current mad-scientist genius, “who would have guessed it was that complicated?”

Fluidly written by Davis, a comedian best known for being half of Franken and Davis (along with fellow SNL writer – later turned politician – Al Franken), the adventure is mostly cheerful and melodic, even when not harmonious. Owsley’s drug business appears to have thrown off enough cash to keep him and his followers in crash pads and the rest of their practicalities were handled with the frugality of artists, trusting to fortune. Brushes with the law are treated as inconveniences, until Stanley serves several years and abruptly shows how much aging he has accumulated. His last years feel bittersweet, as they must have been after such a brightly blazing youth.

A useful antidote to blissful images of the Summer of Love et al, but not one that justifies totally discounting them, just adds another unique perspective.