In a recent conversation, I query my eldest son, now a junior in high school, “Do people still hold hands in the hallways at school? Like kids that are boyfriend and girlfriend, walking to class together?”

He looks at me kind of funny and shakes his head.
 
“Nobody does that.”
 
“What?” I look at him, puzzled, and indignant. “What do you mean nobody holds hands in the hallways? You mean to tell me that kids that are supposedly going out with each other don’t hold hands on the way to class?”
 
“No, I’ve never seen anybody do that.”
 
Aside from being completely bewildered—not being able to wrap my mind around the fact that culturally, socially, in just a generation or so, things had changed so much that kids didn’t interact the same way in school at all.
 
I proceed to rant. “When I was your age, anybody who had a boyfriend or girlfriend, we always held hands in the hallways. Wore our boyfriend’s football jackets and all that—”
 
“Definitely nobody’s doing that anymore, Mom,” he interrupts, reminding me just how cheesy it was. Or was it?
 
I find myself savoring the specifics of my generation.
 
“You don’t seem like the kind of person that would wear a football jacket,” my son says.
 
“I know, but I was. We were undefeated state champs and my boyfriend was cool, the whole team was cool. Any girl who went out with a guy on the football team wore his jacket, for sure.”

Dazed and confused: A bygone era of debauchery, worn with pride
 
I ponder the presumed innocence of my 16-year-old—and how completely reckless and wild I was at his age, as were most of my friends, as were a majority (it seemed) of the kids in my high school. I mean, we were like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or Dazed and Confused. Drunk girls falling down at keg parties in the woods. Guys smoking weed in their little Chevettes in the school parking lot before school, coming into Civics class blind-stoned with glassy eyeballs and goofy smiles on their peach-fuzz faces.
 
Not that I condone all that, necessarily, but there’s something a bit rowdier and more care-free—and I suppose residual of the 60s and 70s—that we who came of age in the 80s got to ride the wave of. And it was (mostly) fun.
 
We were the last generation that had such freedom.
 
“When I was your age, in high school, my girlfriend wrote notes that she signed from my mom to get me out of class early,” I impart to my son. Now that he’s old enough, I drop hints, sparingly, of just how rebellious we were.
 
Now I can’t even take my own kid out of school for a day without a dissertation outlining a worthy excuse. Hell, my kids don’t even wanna miss a day of school. That’s how much more rule-abiding they are.
 
I like that we were hell-raisers. Maybe my crew raised a little more than most but certainly we were well supported in Smallsbury (nickname for Salisbury where I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland) where not mucha nuthin happened unless we made it happen.
 
“God, remember the time we all showed up in court?” I reminisce with a high school girlfriend about the time we had to defend a boy who was at risk of being sent off to forestry camp. This was after a scuffle with some cops one night when we’d all been busted for underage drinking at a party.
 
“We hitchhiked from Ocean City—barefoot!—to show up at the courthouse, can you believe that shit? Then the lawyer said, ‘Now who exactly said, ‘Get your fucking hands off of me’? And I was like, uhh, that was me.”
 
Our friend got sent off to forestry camp anyway.
 
And who the hell has the cojones, the downright dontgiveafuckness to show up in court barefoot? Let alone hitchhike to get there after a night of partying at the beach.
 
Such was the tenor of high school life for me so I find myself still fixated on kids these days not even holding hands in school.
 
“Sheesh,” I say, content to have survived my own madness yet admittedly slightly sorry for my kid, for having not the slightest clue.

In December of 1969, we—along with 300,000 other people—descended on the Altamont Speedway for the giant outdoor free concert that was to be the West Coast’s answer to Woodstock, featuring the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Santana. I was a hippie-baby at Altamont, about fourteen months old at the time.

When I was growing up, my mother would often retell the story of the woman who wanted to hold me at Altamont and next thing they knew she had wandered off with me. 
​
“There we were stoned immaculate when your father realized she was trying to take you.”

I have this image of my father sprinting after the woman, dodging all the drunk and stoned hippies sprawled on blankets.

Years later, my father would insist in a letter to me, "I was not stoned—on anything—I was watching her every move."

In one photo of me, there’s a giant wine jug situated at my feet. Everybody at Altamont can be seen swilling from these massive jugs and passing them around.

We were way far back from the stage like most everyone else, unaware until the next day of Meredith Hunter, the Black teenager who had been stabbed to death by two Hell’s Angels. The Dead had hired a bunch of Bay Area Hell’s Angels to run security at the event. Up by the stage, the Angels had been hostile and brutal. Not the kind of peace and love people were used to. Even Mick Jagger couldn’t get things under control, as you can see in theRolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, which chronicled the whole debacle.

The footage also shows people completely tripped out of their minds in a display of debauchery that even makes me feel a bit uptight. One clip shows a naked woman, totally tripped out of her mind, being led by the hand by two guys on either side of her. Equally disturbing are scenes of people having bad acid trips and being whacked out in general, behaving like the freaks the previous generation must've perceived them to be.

​It’s like being the only sober person in the room watching everybody get embarrassingly drunk and stupid. You just wanna flee. Any romanticized view I previously held of Altamont went out when I watched that movie again after many years. (Though I'm still glad it's on my life experience résumé.)

Source: jaggermorrison2010

Ultimately, there would be four deaths at Altamont (not all related to the Angels) and a clear signal that something had shifted. Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed, writes:

I’ve never been sure if it’s my own imagination and “created” memories of being out West at that time, but internally, soulfully, I have always felt the weight of it, a bygone disappointment weighing down on our little triad as though the end of the era signaled the end of us, and we were so unbearably entangled in music and hippie culture and a certain time and place that there was nothing left to do with the relationship. Like it had run its course. ⏤ excerpt from Letters from East of Nowhere, a memoir due out Father's Day 2022

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Music continued to keep the lines of communication open between us. I remember for my 12th birthday Daddy brought me a Walkman cassette player with headphones. For my 14th it was an all-in-one turntable with radio and cassette. My gifts to him were often record albums my mom knew he would appreciate, like Eric Clapton’s Slowhand or Bob Dylan at Budokan.​

1972 photo of Quicksilver Messenger Service. Left top-Dino Valenti, drums-Greg Elmore, guitar-Gary Duncan. Author; Capitol Records

I remember my father’s sheer delight when he heard I was reading J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in 8th grade, saying it was one of his all-time favorite books ever, so literature, too, became a shared interest. In high school I was soon drawn to Kerouac novels from my mom’s bookshelves and I knew I was drinking from the same fountain as my father. In my mother’s paperback collection, I also discovered the likes of Carlos Castañeda, Henry Miller, Ken Kesey and Anais Nin. ​

When I later attended University of San Francisco, my father turned me on to Richard Brautigan, another late-Beat generation writer, handing me a collection of short stories, including one particularly haunting one called “The Abortion” set in San Francisco in the 60s. ​

Brautigan had been a voice for The Summer of Love and parts of his top-selling book Trout Fishing in America were first published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the legendary proprietor of the City Lights bookstore where the Beat poets and authors all hung out in the 60s. Ferlinghetti was still there during my time in San Francisco and for many years after. I saw that he just died in February 2021 at 101 years old.

When Daddy came out to San Francisco for my graduation in 1995, we had some time together in my apartment at Stanyan and Oak. One quiet afternoon when everyone else was out, we sat in my living room with the bowed windows facing out over Golden Gate Park, listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service at top decibel. 

​“I took you with me to see Quicksilver in concert, you up on my shoulders,” Daddy’s voice is low, a little slurry from the wine. He keeps a jug hidden in his duffel in our extra bedroom. I'm kind of half-asleep, or pretending to be, on the futon sofa and he's sitting on the floor in front of me, leaned back against the futon frame. At some point I drape my right arm over his shoulder. 

“You know who Dino Valente, the lead singer is, don’t you?” he asks.

“Mmm-nnnh.” I muster.

“Dino Valente’s real name was Chet Powers, ‘fact he just died last year. Guy’s a brilliant musician, also went by Jesse Oris Farrow. He wrote the song ‘Get Together’ you probably know, by the Youngbloods.”

I always felt completely inadequate when it came to such knowledge of music while Daddy was this living, breathing historical reference.

“Yeah, you up on my shoulders at that concert; everybody thought you were al-right, kid.”

I try to imagine my one-year-old self with my father squeezed into a packed indoor concert hall in San Francisco in 1969. Without any other details, the vision fades out. But as I’m lying here, together with my father in the city of my birth for the first time since we both left it when I was barely two, I am profoundly aware of why the music—particularly the Sounds of San Francisco like Quicksilver, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, not to mention Dylan, the Stones, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield--it has always felt familiar, like it’s way down in my bones and deep in my soul.

Daddy gets quiet again. We’re just taking in the music and lyrics, probably the only time we’ve ever listened to Quicksilver together like this, ever. Previously, we might have shared only in conversation. The music somehow just didn’t show up when we were together. (And hell, when were we ever really together, anyway? Rarely just the two of us during those 25+ years since he'd left me and my mom.)

But now Quicksilver croons, telling me to hold on girl and not to be blue. It's “Light All Your Windows,” the song that does it for both of us.

Daddy takes my right hand there over his shoulder, pulls it more snugly against his chest and pats it.

“Aww doll,” he says with effort, as if the weight of it all—my whole lifetime, mostly without him—is here in this moment, in the music.

Some years later, the first seven words of that song would be how Daddy communicated with me from Beyond. The lyrics “bleeped” across my forehead like a radio station tuning in momentarily and then gone again, when I had asked for a sign.

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