THE DARKNESS COMES
Everything on the street had changed. Atlanta was not crazy about hippies in the area and had tried various methods to keep the onslaught of thousands of Southern outcasts, the curious and teenyboppers from flooding the small area we lived in.There were times when police returned to the tactics of the depression in dealing with us. In the depression folks were discouraged from entering states looking for work that wasn't there, now the city was trying to figure out what to do with the hippies on the way and were trying to discourage people from moving into the area. I learned really quick to have my fake ID on me at all times but it was getting tiring. I still remember the night I was eating dinner in a restaurant, as cops entered and asked every long hair for their ID. The fun was slipping away.
What did I have to show for it? A pocketful of sunshine. The warmth and camaraderie of the community had outlasted the hippie areas in other parts of the world, here was this last enclave that was just beginning to be hit by speed, crime and the police.
It was like this, dig, I needed a place to crash because I was cross town and had awakened from smoking Vietnamese pot in a bong, so I went out to catch the bus, which I discovered hours before had stopped running. A fellow longhair walked by, I told him my predicament and he offered me a place to crash. Only thing was he was on his way to his girlfriends, so he handed me his keys and pointed out where he lived so I could crash on the couch.
What had pulled us together like this?
We had been beaten, some girls raped, The Bird office had been shot at. This cloud was passing over all of us. It was a change that drifted across the community in fact the entire country and it had a name. MANSON.
The press and the prosecution had a field day comparing all hippies to Manson, all LSD users to murderers, all long hairs to dangerous thugs.
As a child I had first seen Sharon Tate on an episode of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES and let me tell you she was so beautiful it was obvious to me this was a special girl. Found stabbed to death over 14 times after begging for her life and her unborn baby, I couldn't believe anyone would destroy anything so lovely,
Sharon Tate would have been the first star to pose pregnant years before Demi Moore or Britney, unfortunately this picture was taken the day of the murder.
The Manson arrest and newspaper trial had become a trial of a generation. Us.
As a child I first saw Sharon Tate on TV and was amazed. All girls weren't like my mom!
And they had it all to use against us. Beatles records. Drugs. Sex. New Age beliefs. Communes.Hippies. Revolution. Ecology. Being against the war. EVERYTHING. President Nixon voiced his belief the Manson family were all guilty and almost forced an end to the trial with his reckless talk.
I was use to being asked for my ID, but now the cops remembered my name and called it when they asked for me. They watched me, like now they were on to us all. And the press churned the stories out. Manson had brought dead birds back to life, the press babbled, hippies were getting instructions for revolution from Beatles music. LSD had turned a generation insane.
And they made a mistake that would later come back to haunt them. Somehow it wasn't just the fear of maybe 3% of young people. Somehow it became all young people. the tourists who filled their cars and came to look at us found themselves pulled over if they were young. By beginning to treat all young people as the same enemy, they were laying the seeds that would turn demonstrations from several hundred to hundreds of thousands.
Did I realize this all then? I had begun to think about the war, the change in the streets, but had yet to find my voice. My voice was coming, and it would make a loud boom in Atlanta and even nationally. For now I was happy to have free love and enjoy my days and nights. Part of me wondered what love was like, but not enough to stop the fun.
One night, sitting in front of Atlantis Rising a stunning woman I had never seen before walked by with long blond hair and I said, "Hey chick, what's happening?". She turned, walked over to me pointing her finger in my face and said, "Don't you ever call me chick again", and walked away. My buddies sitting next to me cracked up, but I was wondering what the button was she was wearing meant. It looked like a fist coming out of the women's symbol.
I had no way of knowing, but the party was coming to an end. Her accent sounded odd to me, a pal said it was a Boston accent. I chalked up her comment to Northern rudeness. Everyone said chick, even chicks, and the line had helped me get laid before! My reasoning did not see what was coming.
I picked up the newspaper at the Krispy Kreme and saw an article that might just give me a focus. The article was about Buddy Holly, one of my heroes and the studio in Clovis, New Mexico that his band still owned and recorded at. In fact, they were quoted as saying they had tapes of loads of Buddy and The Crickets and I thought this would make a great article. Hitchhike to Clovis and get the story, use it to get a job writing for an underground newspaper. I had to get hold of Sandy the hooker and the AWOL soldier and begin the journey with them to New Orleans during Mardis Gras.
At the time the plan seemed easy..............
