I was just a boy when I went on my first psychedelic drug trip.

It happened during Easter break of 1972 when I was hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley with a friend and schoolmate from Whittier Elementary. My dad gave me money for the movies and to get Italian sodas at Caffe Mediterranean before he settled into his usual spot in front of Cody’s bookstore where he sold his space age medallions. I went to the Med with my buddy and we knocked back our beverages before heading over to the art house cinema where a line had already formed. People were gathered on the sidewalk when we joined the line, just a couple of little kids on campus among an assortment of college students, street people, hippies, and other fans of the Fab Four, all of us waiting to see a Beatles movie marathon.

A medley of odor molecules filled the air with the aroma of city bus fumes, marijuana and incense smoke, patchouli and body odor, and just a whiff of freshly shat dog shit that came out of a mutt that crossed the graffiti covered Avenue when we arrived, leaving a dump at the curb near our feet. The line started moving closer to the box office and a Hare Krishna dude came up the street—like a freaky doppelgänger of the Candy Man from last year’s Willy Wonka movie—and he’s suddenly dispensing hits of blotter acid to the moviegoing masses while reciting the familiar mantra of Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare.

Instead of promises of rainbows and sighs and groovy lemon pies, or a shower of sugary treats, we are serenaded by a bald religious freak who places tiny squares of LSD-infused paper on the palms of our outstretched hands. I take one without really understanding or caring at all what I’m getting myself into simply because there is no adult to stop me from finding out—and because the motto of the street is do your own thing. That mandate includes kids, when it comes to navigating the same unknown territory, and in this instance we will be guided by a hallucinogenic chemical on a piece of paper stamped with a color illustration of Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from the Disney movie Fantasia.

I doubt I considered the probability that my parents would likely shit a brick if they knew I was taking acid before they tried it. They would most certainly be surprised if they learned I was embarking on a fantastical adventure with Hare Krishna Hare Poppins, even though the fellow wasn’t sticking around to witness the turning on and tuning in to come. My folks knew I was being exposed to all kinds of urban street culture that they couldn’t possibly shield me from in the Berserkly ghetto of the 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue. Of course, they were also testing their own limits and I knew they had been smoking pot for at least a year. I reckon that means they might shit a brick of hashish if they knew I was about to slip through the doors of perception like a naughty boy sneaking into a forbidden room.

My parents sometimes expressed concern about my safety when I was in the world without them and they worried about what I might encounter in the schoolyard during recess. Like millions of parents everywhere, they told me to never accept drugs from strangers or other kids. I’d heard from other kids at school that some drugs were better than others and some drugs were much worse and I felt confident that none of my friends used drugs. Some had older siblings that did and I heard some cautionary tales, especially about heroin which had become a real problem on the streets of Berkeley, but I never saw anyone I knew strung out on smack. I told my parents not to worry about me trying hard drugs like heroin at school because the kids at Whittier were savvy enough to jeer and throw rocks at any junkie or dealer that strayed too near the fence around the schoolyard.

Mom and dad weren’t yet hippies but they weren’t exactly straight either, especially when it came to their opinions about illegal drugs, Nixon, and the war in Vietnam. Both were loosening up more, in different ways, after their recent divorce. At the same time, they were still mainstream enough to be the responsible adults that raised me in New York in the mid-sixties before we moved to California at the start of the decade. People around me were in the midst of rapidly changing and evolving every day and experiencing mental and emotional growth spurts akin to a second childhood. Meanwhile, I’m an actual child, trying to reach my developmental milestones in the usual chronological order while also scrambling over those milestones in an effort to keep up with the childlike adults around me.

I began to question confusing statements made by adults after hearing one say that “smoking is bad” a moment before he lit up a cigarette. It’s difficult to trust the judgment and opinions of people that assert that alcohol is dangerous when you’ve seen them having cocktails after dinner. I was only seven years old and I’d heard the phrase do as I say, not as I do enough times to wonder if adults understood how absurd and unfair it sounded. I needed a word to describe the absurd thing adults say and the word was finally heard at the coffeehouse one morning when I overheard someone say, “People are so full of hypocritical bullshit.” When I asked my mom the meaning of hypocritical she explained it and I knew that it was the perfect word to describe adult logic. I was catching glimpses of the man behind the curtain and beginning to wake up to the reality that the path to adulthood led to a cul-de-sac of contradictions.

Marijuana was one of those drugs that wasn’t supposed to be as bad as the others and I recognized weed from the smell and from seeing adults around me smoking pot and noticing that it effected their behavior. I still hadn’t tried smoking reefer, even after some kids laid on the peer pressure, mostly because I didn’t like the smell of it and the idea of inhaling any kind of smoke into my lungs seemed stupid. Adults frequently did stupid things.

For instance, I recently caught my dad tripping on mescaline in front of Peet’s, the neighborhood coffeehouse I mentioned earlier that stands at the corner of Walnut and Vine, just around the corner from where we lived on Oxford Street. I knew he was tripping on something, even before I asked him why he was acting so strange, and he told me what he had taken. Dad was so disoriented and was having such a bad trip that he was relieved and happy to see me so I could help him find his way home. The walk from Peet’s was particularly challenging for my dad that day because apparently the sidewalk was moving. And, even though I perceived the sidewalk as being more traditionally rigid and unmoveable, I knew the futility of arguing with my father when he was certain about something.

I didn’t know what mescaline was, though I’d heard the word before and assumed it was probably an illegal street drug. My dad scored it from his housemates, a very nice young deaf couple who also happened to be the neighborhood drug dealers, operating out of the house my dad moved into after my parents separated. The house was conveniently located next to the building I lived in with my mother and sister—in the same apartment we lived in together with my dad when we first arrived in Berkeley from Long Island.

At this point I should add that everything I thought I knew about LSD came from an episode of a television show called Dragnet.

He was born Michael Mielnik but in the early 1970s most people that lived in Eugene, Oregon knew him as a fire eating, joke cracking, vaudeville performer who called himself the Flaming Zucchini. It was a character he would reprise over the years, even after he rebranded himself at the Oregon Country Faire as the tightrope walking comedic cult leader of the Church of the Incandescent Resurrection.

Ladles and gentimen, I present to you . . . Reverend Chumleigh!

Reverend Chumleigh (actually a trio of madcap-characters-in-one that included Michael and the Flaming Zucchini) was a counterculture vaudevillian that excelled in captivating audiences with his snappy patter, playfully plucked from the Groucho Marx playbook, while engaged in daring acts of derring-do—such as walking barefoot on the business edges of machetes, laying on his back on a bed of nails, and balancing between two chairs while an audience member used a sledgehammer to smash a cinder block on his stomach.

His signature stunt as the Flaming Zucchini was fire-eating, until one fateful summer in 1976, while performing his act in front of a crowd of a thousand peyote-stoned hippies during the midnight show at the Oregon Country Faire, his liver organized a protest march decrying the dangers of hydrocarbons in his body, and he vanished in a huge ball of flame before the amazed fairgoers.

This is Yeoman Janice Rand (aka Grace Lee Whitney), a character that appeared on the starship Enterprise, circa 1966.

She was sort of a glorified space secretary, assigned to Captain Kirk, that served on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Not exactly a feminist icon but nerd boys like me thought she was the tribble’s pajamas. Alas, her tenure lasted only a year before she was replaced by Ensign Chekov in season two of the original series.

I met Ms Whitney in 1977, in Eugene, Oregon, when she was one of the guests of honor at Space Con Five, which was also billed as a Star Trek Festival. I also met George Takei, her co-guest-of-honor and Bob Wilkins (the creator and host of Creature Features), who was the master of ceremony.

But, the biggest thrill for thirteen-year-old me was being Ms Whitney’s assistant when she was signing posters for fans at Gandalf’s Den, a bookstore and role playing game shop in The Atrium, a building on 10th Avenue in downtown Eugene. My job was to roll and rubber band posters after she signed them and hand them off to the fans.

Afterward, she treated me to an ice cream at Prince Pückler’s, on the ground floor of The Atrium, and then kissed me chastely on the cheek before saying goodbye.

It was a half a day’s drive from Aberdeen to Eugene in the Grey Elephant and we arrived at around three o’clock in the afternoon, parking our 1956 International Harvester Metro Van in front of a large house at the corner of 12th & Ferry, several blocks from the University of Oregon campus.

The summer heat that day was awful and the van had overheated more than once during the drive. We’d soon learn that our arrival in Eugene coincided with the hottest day on record. August 7, 1972 recorded a blistering temperature of 106° Fahrenheit.

Relieved to be released from the belly of the Elephant, we walked toward East 13th Avenue—my dad and I shirtless while Linda followed behind in the sun dress her sister had given her in Los Angeles.

Turning left on 13th, and staying on the left side of the street, we headed east until we reached a corner store at Patterson Street called Bob’s Superette, where we stopped to buy soda pop, sunflower seeds, and beef jerky. Just after crossing Patterson we passed by a dry cleaners next to a bookstore called Koobdooga and the next house over (an orange and brown American Craftsman house with a yellow porch) was the Eggsnatchur Natural Foods Restaurant run by the guys that were selling honey ice cream at the Renaissance Fair in Veneta last month.

It’s raining today in my corner of California and rain always makes me think of the blues. And the blues, plus the rain, makes me think of Oregon—where I grew up during my teen and young adult years in a city called Eugene.

I was 13 in the summer of 1977 and still listening mostly to The Beatles and The Who, but I was getting tired of all the usual stuff I listened to and was primed for some new music. Billy Joel’s The Stranger had recently been released and it was fast becoming a favorite. Then I discovered Mississippi John Hurt and Lightning Hopkins and was instantly hooked.

Later that same year, a movie called Animal House was being filmed in town and it’s star, John Belushi, met a local blues artist named Curtis Salgado, who was playing a gig at the Eugene Hotel with his band, The Nighthawks. That meeting was the spark that inspired the first appearance of two characters named Jake and Elwood Blues on Saturday Night Live, which spawned a couple of hit singles that were played frequently by radio disc jockeys.

A couple of years later in 1980, The Blues Brothers was a hit movie and the soundtrack for it became hugely popular, especially in Eugene. The film reinvigorated the careers of soul and blues legends such as James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, to name just a few.

1980 was the year of the blues and it was also the year that Eagle Park Slim came to town. Slim’s motto was “ain’t no time to hate” and his mission was “peace through music.” He’s one of the many hard-working blues musicians in the country that never achieved fame and in my opinion it’s a damn shame.

Eagle Park Slim was thirty-eight years old when he moved from Colorado to Oregon and he got to work immediately as a blues busker. Slim was a seasoned professional that immediately made himself at home playing on the streets of downtown Eugene and around the university campus. Soon he was booking gigs in coffeehouses and bars and at the Eugene Saturday Market, with just a guitar and a kazoo.

Autry McNeace was born on January 11th, 1942, in Eagle Park, Illinois. He grew up with the blues and started playing at his mother’s club, The Village Tavern, in 1954. I don’t know when he took on the name Slim to go with the name of his city of birth but he was still in Eagle Park in the 1960s, working a regular gig on Sundays at Leo’s Tavern, playing guitar with Little Walter J. & His Hard Working Phantoms.

Slim expanded his territory to East St. Louis and across the river in St. Louis, playing with blues pianist, Johnnie Johnson. During his lifetime, Slim would also play along with Chuck Berry, James Brown, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson, Percy Mayfield, Ike Turner, Little Walter, Joe Cocker, Keb Mo, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’m sure I’ve left out many other famous and well-established artists.

In the 1970s, before he settled in Eugene, Slim moved to Colorado, and Eagle Park Slim & The Mile High Blues Band were the house band at an after hours club in Denver, with a regular gig Thursday to Saturday from 11pm to 3am.

I was fourteen or fifteen when I first met Slim and heard him play the blues and I got to know him better after I graduated from high school, when I was working at Prince Pückler’s, an ice cream parlor with one shop at 8th & Willamette downtown and another on 13th Avenue, across the street from Poppi’s Greek Taverna and Lenny’s Nosh Bar. I worked at both locations and I always treated Slim to a cup of coffee whenever he came into the one of the shops.

The free coffee for Slim continued over the years and our conversations continued when I worked at the Coffee Corner kiosk at 5th Street Public Market in the mid-eighties. My jam on the boom box in the kiosk was usually blues (I was also obsessed with Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive) and I think he appreciated my musical taste when he sat at table in front of the kiosk. If it wasn’t Slim sitting there it was often Steve Ibach and Teddy “Honey Boy” Roy of The Soulsations, a new group they had formed with my pal Joe Lewis that was swiftly becoming the hottest band in town.

In those days you could go out almost any night and hear the blues played live for free or so cheap that it didn’t matter. There was a Monday night Blues Jam at Old Taylor’s on campus that you could see for fifty cents. I wasn’t hanging out with friends at Lenny’s Nosh Bar I was probably out somewhere else listening to the blues.

And Eagle Park Slim always seemed to be around—a warm presence that made everyone around him feel happy. It’s funny, blues has a rep for making people feel sad but hearing Slim play the blues was more like the antidote for sadness.

I recently called Slim’s long-time friend, Jan Brown, and asked her to share some recollections for this piece I’m writing. She told me she met Slim in 2002 at a bus stop and he was boldly flirtatious, singing a Lou Rawls song to her while they were waiting for the bus. Not knowing he was a professional, she complimented him on his singing voice, and he introduced himself and gave her a flyer advertising his next gig with The Vipers, a group he played with that also featured the aforementioned Steve Ibach from the defunct Soulsations.

Jan said she was a busy single mom at the time, and didn’t get out much to hear live music, but she recognized his talent immediately. They rode the bus together and before he got off at his stop he gave her his phone number and told her to give him a call sometime. Later that day, at the adult foster home where she was working as a caregiver, she showed the flyer to a couple of women and they both squealed with excitement. They were both Eagle Park Slim fan girls. So, at their urging. Jan called Slim and went out to see his show. It was the beginning a beautiful friendship and partnership that lasted for twelve years—until they parted amicably in 2014.

I also called Slim’s friend, Randy Layton, who released Slim’s first professionally produced album, Northwest Blues, a 1998 CD that had the appearance of a vinyl record from the 1960s. Randy wanted to give Slim an album to sell when he was busking—one that looked professional—and it was an album that Slim owned outright after the first pressing. The album has 22 tracks that Randy says “was pretty much a compilation of cassettes he gave out in the streets in the early days of busking.” Randy (also an accomplished writer) wrote the liner notes.

A few random things about Slim:

He frequently wore a fedora, like any self-respecting blues man, and quite often a tie-dyed shirt with dress pants. Like a true Eugenean, he loved his tie-dyed shirts and he had a multitude in his closet.

He usually arrived to his evening gigs by taxi. Often a friend would drop him off at a street corner when he was busking. If he was playing at a bar and you offered to buy him a drink he might accept a snifter of brandy.

At home, he had a poster of Jimi Hendrix on his wall and another picture of Jimi in the window near the recliner where he always sat. Jan says that Slim revered Hendrix.

One last thing of interest I should mention. Eagle Park Slim is remembered by many in Eugene as the first person they met when they arrived. And most of those people will tell you how much they loved him, and talk about the impact he made on their experience in Eugene. And Slim loved them back. And, most of all, he loved Eugene.

***

It’s a year later and I just found my notes from the January 2022 call I made to Jan Brown. I might roll some of this stuff into another revision of this piece but for now, here’s the raw material, if anyone is interested:

Slim mentored a young musician named Andy Strange who would later have a band called Andy Strange and the Strangetones. Slim was very proud of Andy.

Slim loved the ladies that danced at his shows.

Slim and Jan never lived together but they were in a relationship for awhile. Whenever she left after visiting him he sang “Hate to See You Go” or “Baby Don’t Leave.” Sometimes he called her his wife because he didn’t want to call her his manager, though she did a lot with helping him with booking shows. Jan learned how to use a computer from helping Slim put together flyers and book shows. Jan said it gave her a purpose. “He gave me a reason to learn to use a computer.”

Slim was cautious about playing in Springfield. Once, he and Jan were looking into booking a show in Springfield and they were walking through downtown and he said, “Don’t hold my hand.” He had experienced some racism in Springfield and was cautious about appearances.

He always liked to play with his band on his birthday.

Slim had one son, who lives in Denver.

He was always excited when he was on television. He’d bring over some black velvet cake to share and some chicken wings from Dairy Mart.

His influences: Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Joe Cocker, Keb Mo, The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

He recorded “Baby Don’t Let Me Go Homeless” with Keb Mo and was payed in classic fashion through Western Union.

He didn’t like to fly, prefering travel by train.

He was a Rodney Dangerfield fan and memorized his jokes. He named Jan’s cats after ex-girlfriends and she named her chijuaja Rodney Dangerfield.

He had pocket bottles of brandy, loved fried chicken.

Slim died in his sleep suddenly during a heatwave in August 2016. He was under a lot of stress from moving and his heart just gave out on him. He’d had two heart surgeries that gave him an extra ten years than what he was expecting and had a pacemaker placed nine months before he died.

All of the songs he wrote came from his daily experiences and feelings and he made most of his money, just enough to get by, through busking.

He loved the rain but he loved the sunshine too because that’s when people came out and he loved to be around people and watch people. He loved to tell stories about the places he played.

“Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend” was a phrase I heard fairly often in the 1970s, usually spoken slowly in a fake Southern drawl, and the phrase became popular in the American counterculture after it was featured in the 1969 film, Easy Rider.

Composed by Elliot Ingber, a guitarist in Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention in the mid-sixties, and Stash Wagner of The Fraternity of Man, the band that recorded the song for the soundtrack, the title and refrain gets its name from the actor Humphrey Bogart.

🎶 Musical Interlude 🎶

Now, I dunno if Bogie actually partook in the reefer, but he had a habit, in cigarette smoking scenes in tough guy roles in his movies, of leaving a gasper dangling from his lips without taking a drag. That act of wastefully letting a cigarette smolder, without inhaling the smoke, inspired the expression among pot smoking counterculture wits.

I was eight years old the first time I heard it.

The year was 1972 and I’d recently arrived in Bandon, a small coastal town in Oregon, after traveling the backroads of America in a bread truck for a few months with my dad and his girlfriend. We landed at a hippie crash pad and stayed with people we had just met; fellow freaks with an open door policy that was still part of the hippie homesteader etiquette esthetic in rural areas of the country.

That night, in the living room, after a shared meal, our host produced a mystery joint he had received from a friend in the mail. He lit the joint and passed it around to the group and, when it came to me, nobody thought to say, “No, you can’t have a toke because you’re just a kid.” Bear in mind, this was a time of testing mainstream values and almost everything was permissible.

I took a drag and let the joint hang from my lip. That’s when the phrase was uttered and explained.

Passing the joint, I felt the room spin, and promptly passed out.