Peoples Park

Life is so weird.  Its like an endless loop that keeps taking me round and round in the same circles.

Lately I’ve been getting on this Beatles fan message board and arguing about all things Beatles (www.abbeyrd.proboards.com ).  Recently the subject of discussion was the song “Angela” by John Lennon about the ’60s radical-slash-revolutionary Angela Davis.  It was from Lennon’s political album, “Some Time in New York City” when Lennon was hanging out with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and at the height of his radical chicness.

It was odd because I have a weird personal connection with both Angela Davis and John Lennon and that fastly fading period of history.  One of the main reasons Angela Davis got fired from her job at UCLA was because of her comments in 1969 that “the UC regents killed, brutalized and murdered the Peoples Park demonstraters” and her repeated characterization of the police as “pigs.”

Lennon also weighed in on the Peoples Park riots. This was during his famous Bed-In-for-Peace period and he was reaching out to just about every media outlet. And he did a live interview with Scoop Nisker (a guy I still see around town) on KPFA (the famous “underground” radio station of the day) where he basically advised the demonstraters to “man the  barricades with flowers.”

Forty years later Peoples Park is still very much here.  And I hang out there just about every day with all the other homeless bums.  It’s basically become a homeless squat these days, with homeless people flopped out on just about every square inch of grass.  Life is ironic like that, ain’t it?

But some people still remember what Peoples Park once was and what it meant to so many people.  To give you an idea of what a happening place it was back in the day, I recently came across an old flier for a Peoples Park Benefit Concert at Winterland in 1970.  The line-up featured, among others, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Santana,  Steve Miller, Boz Skaggs, and Credence Clearwater Revival.  And tickets were a whopping 5 bucks.  Man, those were the days!

But those days are long gone, alas.   Like I said, my life just keeps getting loopier and loopier.

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