1967. A Connecticut prep school boy with a new driver’s license and an Ozzie & Harriet haircut. Never been to a rock concert. My cousin, an undergraduate at Yale, had started out organizing and producing folk concerts there, had since branched into rock. Very good bands were available then for not a lot of money. Tom had already pulled in Jefferson Airplane and Cream.
Tom needed ushers for Country Joe and the Fish, who would play at a crumbling music hall in a neighborhood seedy even for New Haven. I recruited some buddies—same prep school, same haircuts, and we decided to wear blazers and ties, fercrhissake—and we drove from Hartford packed into Mom’s Chevy Corvair. My girlfriend, my first true love, came too.
It was wicked cool to be part of the production team at this event. In every other respect we could not have been less cool, more geometrically square, more antithetical in appearance to all this concert represented. The first patron I assisted looked like Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century man of letters, complete with wig, except it wasn’t a wig. The next looked like Jigger Johnson, lumberjack. Then came Jeremiah Johnson, mountain man.
The air was already sweet with pot. Jeremiah took back his ticket stub, eased his buck-skinned bulk into a fifth-row seat, looked at his usher the way the Wampanoags must have looked at the Pilgrims. “You’re not from around here, are you, man?”
I couldn’t have ached more to be where he was from. The Fish came on. If you listen close enough to “Section 43,” you can hear the beating heart of God. The first time is still the best.
My girlfriend came from up the coast, from East Lyme, and Lynn’s mother wanted her home by ten. She and I left in the middle of “Bass Strings”—I believe I’ll go out to the seashore, let the waves wash my mind/ Open up my head now just to see what I can find—it felt like coitus interruptus (as if I knew what that felt like then).
By the time I got back to pick up the other ushers, the concert was over. They were scuffling around in front of a dark building, glad not to have gotten mugged yet. It was all just beginning.
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