4/24/23
Newsletter #316
The Crack of Dawn
At some point in the late-1970s, I was camping out on my buddy Sheldon’s couch in L.A., having no doubt overstayed my welcome. Sheldon had gone out and I was sitting on the couch reading. A knock came at the door and I went and answered it. There stood a clean-cut fellow of about 30, dressed neatly in a suit and tie, and holding a briefcase. He seemed deathly serious as he asked, “Is Sheldon here?” I said, “No, he’s out, who should I say stopped by?” The fellow said, “Tell him Richard Cowsill came by,” then he turned and walked away. I watched him go, thinking, “Cowsill? Could he be related to the band the Cowsills?”
For the youngsters reading this, the Cowsills were a pop band of the 1960s composed of one large family, with a mother, but no father. The concept of the Cowsills – a family pop band run by the mother – became the TV show, The Partridge Family. The Cowsills had two hit songs: The Rain, the Park and Other Things, and their version of the hit Broadway show’s title song, Hair. From 1967 to 1969 the Cowsills were huge. Anyway, when Sheldon got home I told him that Richard Cowsill had stopped by. Sheldon’s eyes widened and he said, “Richard Cowsill stopped by?” I said, “Yeah, was he one of the Cowsills?” Shaking his head sadly, Sheldon said, “No, he’s the oldest brother who went to Vietnam. That’s where I met him. While he was in Vietnam, his family became a worldwide phenomenon, and Richard went nuts. Richard is still nuts. I’m glad I wasn’t here.”
Although I can’t remember why, in the fall of 1968 my family took one of our very few family vacations and we drove to Toronto, which is two hours north of Detroit. I was ten. Toronto in 1968 was the center of the American draft-dodger movement. There were literally thousands of draft-age American boys hiding out there in plain sight. If you were dodging the draft, you were a hippie. So, Toronto had become the Berkeley, California, of Canada – it was a big, defiant hippie love-fest. The streets were jammed with hippies from everywhere in all of their regalia. My parents had no idea to what they were exposing myself and my older sister Ricki. She and I both immediately became hippies. Whatever the hell they stood for, that’s what we stood for.
We went into a totally cool record store with incense burning and blacklights illuminating garishly colorful posters, like the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland and R. Crumb’s Keep on Trucking. Ricki and I both chipped in and bought one of the early double-records, Living the Blues by Canned Heat (I still have it). We went into a terrific army surplus store and I got a green, waist-length, tailored, Canadian Air Force jacket that fit perfectly. Although I was still a square, ten-year-old kid, with my new jacket I felt like I had joined up.
The movie Oliver! (1968) had just opened. It was playing at big, ornate movie theater, with spotlights. My whole family got dressed up, as you would at that time, and saw the movie. The lead of this gigantic, overblown movie is Mark Lester, who is the same age as me. As I watched the opening number I thought, “Why does he get to be in this movie, and I don’t?” Then he started to sing, Who Will Buy This Wonderful Morning, and I thought, “Well, OK, he can sing . . . and he’s cute and British, but otherwise we’re the same age.” And, it seemed clear to me, that if he could be in the movies, so could I. And it was right there that I decided I was going into the movies. Since I had no idea what a director was, I wanted to be an actor.
The next year my whole family went and saw Easy Rider (1969). I clearly recall my father huffing and puffing as he lit his cigarette after the movie, muttering, “What the hell was that about?” The next day, and God only knows where I found it, I sewed an American flag on the back of my Canadian Air Force jacket, very carefully with red thread, and now I was the coolest kid in 6th grade. I didn’t have long hair, yet.
This is me at the age of 15 or 16. A proud example of pure defiance. Tell me to do anything and I’ll tell you to fuck yourself.
And so the sun rises over Pago Pago, and a new day dawns.