When Charlie was One, or Rather, Wasn’t
Perhaps you’ve seen the colorful
postcards, most of which bear the psychedelically lettered, ‘Being is
Beyond Charlie’. Maybe you’ve gone to the parties, often
crowded but always loud, with light-show effects and sporadic dancing to a
(mostly) 60’s rock ’n’ roll soundtrack that runs the gamut
from lost gold to doomed obscurity…
"Yes, but who’s Charlie?"
someone is sure to ask; and one might fairly reply, "Charlie? A figment of nostalgia, my dear, a ghost raised by fleeting
memories of vanished youth; a phantom, fated to dance for a night, and fade
again."
Yes, some of us still celebrate our
footsteps; and why not? Time appears, looms over us, breathes on us sweetly or
foully according to our own air, but flits away. Just as inevitably, sooner or
later, one way or another, dancing or sandbagged, we too shall become at last
permanent residents of the past.
Of course, the original Charlie party was
not about the past. Most of us were young, so it was about what was happening,
which is to say, what was passing. Charlie was an end of summer dance party
… one last long fling before the romance had to stop … or start
… or change gears ...
Important point: It was not the ‘Summer of Love’.
Not that there was anything wrong with 1967
that couldn’t have been fixed with a lot less attention from the press
… * sigh * … What a bad joke gone worse the hippie craze
was. And it all started with the sainted S.F. Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and his relentless popularization of the Beatniks.
Items from the Beat culture made his name-drop sundae tres cool,
oh yes. Hipness was the tastiest olive in the surreal
martini… But as time passed,
Big Hip… Little
Hippie. There you have it.
The other problem came about because the
Beatniks were so film noir, so folk-and-jazz.
Not just
No, for today’s
Anything-Goes-If-It’s-Over-the-Top stage dress, we really have to thank,
or blame, the San Francisco Sound, as performed by the Beau Brummels,
the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Youngbloods, Blackburn & Snow, Country Joe, the Sons of
Champlin, Big Brother, Blue Cheer, the original
Dead… The audience never had any idea what the singer was going to wear,
if anything; much less could anyone be sure what it would sound like.
But there was more to Charlie than fancy
clothes, hormones and the love of music. It was the attitude, really … an
attitude which has never resurfaced, despite the most whole-hearted of efforts
to re-evoke it. What was it, precisely? I wish I knew.
I can say, back then
Wait, maybe the word I wanted was
‘innocence’?
No, that’s not it. Innocence does
return… Forgive me. I digress.
The original Charlie dance tapes broke out
of their boxes into a tiny apartment decorated with flashing red and blue lightbulbs, maybe a dozen balloons in similarly primary
colors, a borrowed black light and several even more colorful posters scavenged
from such dance palaces as the Harmon Gym, the Fillmore Auditorium, the Avalon
Ballroom … Nestled betwixt and between were an uncertain number of
intentionally enigmatic hand-lettered notices, generally adjudged to be
gibberish. Two have remained in memory: ‘Nirvana Night Circus’ and
‘Being is beyond Charlie’.
"Charlie?" one asks again. "Is this like Ringo Starr being asked what he called his haircut?"
Well, yes and no. To the hipsters of olden
times, ‘Mister Charlie’ was a code name for the ordinary man in the
street… the square who ‘just doesn’t
get it’.
Really, you see, everything is beyond
Charlie.
-- David R. Bradley, Summer 2002
This screed brought to you by the makers and distributors of
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