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From Full Flight
By Marty Balin and Robert Yehling
©2002 SAF Publishing. Reprinted by Permission.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Summer Inhaled

Ah, you're my best friend
And I love you so well
To the end of time you won't see me

Ah, you're my best friend
And I see you it seems
Now I can see I've fallen
Into your love stream

Follow your dream,
Do you know what I mean?
Follow you wherever time
Will take me to.

During the mid-1960s, you wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere but San Francisco. It was a beautiful scene. I used to live on Haight Street, and I watched the street change considerably from 1965 to 1968. A cultural revolution was taking form in sleepy little Haight-Ashbury.

There was a major difference between this and past revolutions: We, the musicians, were at the center of it. After the tour buses came, they made it a one-way street because it was so popular, then they turned it back into a two-way. Haight Street went through so many cultural changes in such a short period of time. Until all the runaways came and the bad drugs like cocaine, smack and speed hit the streets, we defined the Haight itself.

The Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco was most beautiful when it was a little scene. It was an art nouveau enclave, a real progressive, creative, vibrant art community, then the music came along and dramatically changed everything. And there was the (Vietnam) War. We had just been through the Kennedy assassination; that was a shock. Four months after Kennedy was shot, in March 1964, the Beatles hit. They were a real injection of new spirit; I remember how it infected me. So, walking Haight Street on a Sunday afternoon was a beautiful thing. Everybody was out in their velvets and leathers, just thoroughly enjoying each other's company, smoking grass, making music, then going to their Victorian flats and making love.

The great movements in history, great movements in any art, always came from a community of ideas. The Haight-Ashbury was a community of ideas. Artists get together and out of that comes some real heavy ideas. Much higher than an individual, what he can do alone. So even when the Haight-Ashbury became infamous or dead, there was still a community. They couldn't kill it. And that's always affected music. I like what George Hunter of the Charlatans said about it: "There was such a clear difference between the norm and anyone outside the norm. Everybody who was the least bit different felt a change in the air, a kind of manifest destiny."

I don't think you can separate the San Francisco scene from the music. The two fed each other. Those of us who were there "at the beginning" dreamed that we could have a scene where people loved each other and worked together so that everyone would be happy and in a state of peace. We wanted people to be free, spontaneous, and as creative as they could possibly be. I know that's how I was thinking, and why it came out in my music and the music of the hundreds of bands that popped up in a very short period of time. When everyone gathered for the Longshoreman's Hall dance in October of 1965, we all clearly saw that this was a community and it was happening.

San Francisco was a bastion of sanity and freedom compared to the rest of the country. I used to leave San Francisco with the Airplane and be amazed at the condition of the rest of the country. They thought we were outrageous, with our clothes and beads and long hair, the drugs and the music. In the early days, we would leave town, then come back and breathe huge sighs of relief. One of the only exceptions is when we went to New York; New York was pretty cool. Chicago was pretty cool. Carnaby Street in London was cool. These cities had good bands, good music and people who related to us. But the rest of the world? It was pretty strange. We realized that being in San Francisco was like being in heaven-on-earth. I've heard Paul Kantner describe San Francisco as something like 49 square miles of freedom surrounded by craziness. He's right.

Acid and mind-expanding drugs were a big part of the scene. They helped to define what we were doing in San Francisco, and I believe they showed us what was possible. Had the drug scene never gone beyond acid and grass, everything would have been great. We talked about it a lot over the years. And we experimented with everything that came along. I remember one of my friends, Jim Morrison, and I sitting around talking about Rimbaud's theory of the derangement of the senses, and how you have to blow your senses completely apart in order to understand experience and perception, and to see everything.

Well, we tried. We would drink some whiskey, a bottle of wine, or some tequila all at once. We would get ourselves really bombed. Plus some speed, acid, marijuana, what other people did. Janis was into heroin, and Paul was into coke for awhile. And then you'd have these people mixing new concoctions and batches in the labs and giving them to us to try out first. There was STP. I remember the night we were turned onto Orange Sunshine; that was powerful stuff.

"No thanks," I said to Owsley's people the next time it came around. "It messed us up pretty bad last night."

We would really get ourselves out there, because we believed you had to blow your mind apart to find something true. This was before I learned that there is a much better, healthier and more enduring "high" in meditation and the yogic way; I mean, what is better or more true than being connected to the divine in your waking and sleeping life, where every minute is a meditation? When every moment of every performance is a walking meditation?

Unfortunately, some of us didn't live long enough to see that there were other ways to get high. That is the dark side of the scene. If you look through the pages of time, whenever there's a breakthrough in consciousness or evolution, some of those breaking through die young for whatever reason.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Songwriter's Soul