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Interview with Mike Marino
Thanks to the internet, we now can travel
to far away land, far away places as well
as travelling back to the past and
reminiscense about our life's
experiences way back.
We can also travel back to the places
where we used to live and how they were
back then. There are many web sites for
baby boomers that take us back to the
journeys of the past. Journeys that we
might have done ourselves or journeys
and trips that we wished we had or we
just dreamt about.
Here we are honored to be able to share a
conversation with Mike Marino, an author of
ROAD TRIPPIN' USA book.
Mike's web site and his book will take us
back to mystical journeys from the 50's,
the 60's and the 70's.
Question: (Jeri Maier)
For an opening question-first can you tell us a
little about yourself?
ANSWER: (Mike Marino)
In addition to being a freelance writer and starving,
yet published author, I've also had a career in rock
n' roll radio in the rustbelt known as the Motor City,
where I was born. Actually in Detroit, babies aren't
born, we roll off the assemblylines. Cars and cruisin'
were always a part of the chrome-magnon car culture
there and Woodward Avenue and rock n' roll were the
fuels that propelled that generation, at that time,
and especially in that town.
The neighborhood was decidedly Italian and Sicilian,
with names like Marino, Vitti, Scalisi, Russo, and
Mafioso, you know, vowels at the end of names, not
like the Irish, with vowels at the beginning. After a
few years on the road living in Hawaii and San
Francisco, with a brief stint living on Sunset Strip
in LA, I ended up in radio somehow, completely by
accident by the way, and it eventually took me to my
adopted hometown of San Francisco, where years prior,
previous lifetime, I had lived a somewhat streetwise
existence. Now as a broadcaster, I enjoyed ten years
flying around the airwaves and had a rock n' roll
oldies show on Saturday Night called "The Blue Suede
Cruise". Greased and gassed, we rocked for 5 hours
every Saturday with all requests and had a feature we
called the Dovetail Doubleshots...two psychedelic
tunes in a row..of course some of those songs are 14
minutes long and leaves plenty of time to eat pizza
among other things.
I started writing a few years back in response to a
magazine who saw my website and had me write an
article on whatever I wanted, although it had to be
travel oriented. So, North Beach: The Beat Goes On!
followed by Haight Ashbury: The Spare Change Tour!
came about. Once these appeared online, I was
approached by other editors who wanted to use them, as
well as a supply of fresh stuff from the literary
weedpatch, so it just grew from there. Then I was
coaxed into writing a book, rambles on Pop Culture,
and wrote it as a labor of love and badda bing, badda
boom, well, now it's buydabook!
Question: (Jeri Maier)
Reading your book, one can imagine travelling back
through time and spaces. Time in the 60s and 70s...
spaces, places where all the dramas of those time
happened when we were young and innocent.
ANSWER: (Mike Marino)
In retrospect the Eisenhower '50s and the madcap '60s
do seem innocent to a point until we strip away the
veneer and look below it...in the 1950's for example
The Cold War was bearing down on not a few continents
like a political and possibly, nuclear Ice Age and the
south was still a cauldron of hatred and lynchings and
segregation was still alive. Then in the 1960's
Vietnam was sharing the psyche with V-8's, two
Kennedy's were gunned down and Martin Luther King, Jr
in Memphis, and folks were getting their heads beat in
on the streets of Mayor Daleys Chicago. Then their was
The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Warren Commission,
and in the 1970's winding down in Vietnam and of
course, the debacle of Watergate, and the resignation
of a US President for the first time in History
But...living as we all did one day at a time, the big
picture wouldn't be clear until much later..in mental
re-runs that we humans are famous for. It was too
large of a picture to comprehend at once at the time
of it's happening and we all suffered from a "can't
see the social forest for the tree's" visibilty.
Today, in retrospect, they were innocent, at least we
were as to the full impact of the times and managed to
grow and be influenced by them as few generations have
before, excepting of course, the generation prior to
ours.
Were they the good old days? Only time will tell, but
I can tell you this, sitting in a small apartment in
the Haight, it's two in the morning, the wee smalls, a
fog in the room and Surrealistic Pillow on the record
player..yeah, they were the good old days and wouldn't
have wanted to live at any other time..except maybe in
the 1600 or 1700's..always wanted to be a pirate!
Question: (Jeri Maier)
I noticed that you talked about living in San
Francisco in one of your articles. Tell me about
The Beat and of living there
ANSWER: (Mike Marino)
North Beach is a very interesting neighborhood. In the
mid-1960s the bongos and the beats were still jazzin'
it up on Columbus Avenue and when I got there in 1965
it wouldn't be long until the counter culture court
jester, Lenny Bruce would die in 1966, and Jack
Kerouac would cash in his chips in 1969. So the Beat
scene was on the edge of the darkside of the moon.
Kerouac had already told the up and coming generation
"to leave him alone and find their own heroes" and
would begin hangin' out with folks like William
Buckley, Jr, and Lenny was talking only about his drug
busts and wasn't funny anymore and stopped holding up
the societal mirror in our faces.
I had arrived in North Beach after a couple of years
living on the beach in Hawaii, so the beachbum years
were behind me, see, there's that pirate thing again,
and after returning to the mainland to LA decided that
the Sunset Strip was a bit too glitzy for my
Midwestern, plaid and proud tastes, so took a 'Hound
north to North Beach.
The most striking thing about the area were the smells
of foods. Good Italian foods of course, and the bars,
but was too young to get in or get served, but when
your 17 in North Beach the sounds are intoxicating
enough. At night, the Beach was at it's tawdry best.
Neon and strip clubs with jazz and other forms of
music coming from darkened doorways, street barkers
hawking away the peep shows and of course, Carol Doda
launching the age of topless dancing and testing the
moral fiber of America with her lethal weapons!
Apartments were cheap at the time and temporary to say
the least. Just crash pads really and if you got to
know people, you could have a place most nights. Food
was easy and even underage, you could get a cheap
bottle.
Found out later that Jack Kerouac was living at 23
Russell Street just north of the Beach when he wrote
"On The Road" and in later years made the pilgrimage
to the alley street just one block long and there it
was, is to this day. Also next door to City Lights
Bookstore is an alley with Vesuvio's on the other side
and it's appropriately called Jack Kerouac Lane..and
the Beat Goes On!
In 1966 the Haight was beginning to sprout into full
blown psychedelia within a year and living in North
Beach used to go up there "on vacation" as we called
it and in 1966 made the move to land of peace, love
and spare change. It was colorful even then and had
more of a sense of community unlike the circus
atmosphere that would take over with a flood and
influx the following year. I do remember the first day
on the street I walked straight into one of my writing
idols, Richard Brautigan! That cinched it for me and
made plans to dig in deep. After sleeping in crashpads
and the like, I got it together and with someothers
got a place right on Haight Street over the Jukebox
Bar. Shared kitchen, bathroom and all that, not a loft
apartment by any stretch of the imagination!
A group called the Diggers had a paper called the
Digger Papers and also ran the Free Store where
literally everything was free. Cigarettes, books and
magazines on the mezzanine level and clothing, mainly
jeans in the basement along with some field jackets
that came in handy on foggy Ess Eff nights.
At night you could hang out at Tracy's Donut Shop
listening Bob Dylan songs and in the daytime you could
crash in the back room of the Psychedelic Shop for a
few hours amongst, the music, the sitars, the incense
and the blacklights. Sometimes at night the Park
Station cops would sweep the streets looking for
runaways and enlarged pupils, no not big students, but
chemical reactions in the eyes and bust people left
and right, I guess politically mostly those of us on
the Left! Whenever they started heading down for a
sweep the word went out and evrybody scattered like
birds on the wing.
It was a neighborhood of Grateful Deads, Hells Angels,
and yep, even Charles Manson lived on Cole Street for
awhile so there is the dark side of tie-dyed! Bands
would get up on the flatbed trucks in the Panhandle
and entertain and the Diggers would feed the masses
beans and hamburger around 4pm most days.
The Filmore was a cheap date and for pennies you could
see some of the greatest amalgams of acts on the
planet and get a free apple on the way in too!
'67 saw the largest assemblage yet and things were
getting crowded. Bus tours, wannabe's and junkies
started moving in and soon Hip Was Dead and actually
buried that year. The Summer of Love was about to fade
into memory and was at that point I moved out of the
Haight and into North Beach again. Soon I made my way
back east and like anyone without any discernable
skills, went into Radio!
Years later in 1996 went down to the Haight with my
kids to show them the neighborhood and started taking
a picture of the GAP, old apartment now gone, up in
smoke I suppose. Anyway, a street guy comes up to me
and says "Man, why you takin' a picture of the GAP
for"? I looked at him and said, "30 years ago that was
my apartment" He looked, eyes got wide and he said,
"Damn, let me take your picture with it in the
background" He did, I have it today, and he got 5
bucks! The cost of spare change has gone up but well
worth the price of that picture with me and my kids!
Question: (Jeri Maier)
That is fascinating! How about Route 66 -
can you relate about the experiences
you had and if you have done some
travelling on it?"
ANSWER: (Mike Marino)
I was lucky in a way to actually travel on Route 66
when it actually was Highway 66 and not dotted with
brown "historic" route signs..nope, it was the real
deal then and as ornery a two lane as anyone could
build. I did travel to and fro to the Midwest on
occasion to visit my family and always on the way back
either hitched the southern route (easier to get rides
on it in those days than the closer Highway 50, plus
it eliminated nights sleeping in the mountains in the
cold fall and early spring). Once got a ride where you
share the expenses out of Detroit so drove the whole
length (from Joliet anyway in Illinois) with two
others.
Food was cheap along the way and the desert always
comfortable at the right time of the year. The cacti
in bloom and the Panamint Mountains kind of purple
like in the distance. Hitching was a recognized mode
of travel in those days, however, wouldn't recommend
it today. Steinbeck called it the "river of
immigrants" as the Okies trudged to California, and in
the '60s the floodtide of new immigrants also hit the
road to paraphrase Kerouac here, "leave your youth
behind in the east and seek your future in the
west"..something like that.
Route 66 was the Mother of Roads to many and the
roadheads and dharmabums of the 1960's were also her
beloved children. Today it's all memorialized by many
who decry her demise, and it's not the two lanes that
are missed but the times themselves. Two lanes are
wonderful, but Interstates also Kick Asphalt!
Continued To Part 2
Read some of Mike's articles
The Roadhead Chronicles
Where Pop Culture and Chrome Meet Asphalt and Art! - Order Page
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