Gathering Moss (I): Imaginary Speech
Eating with Rolling Stone at the "Free Speech Cafe"
Part I: The Imaginary Speech
“Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces….To describe it any further would be difficult without sounding like bullshit, and bullshit is like gathering moss.”
—Jann Wenner, Oct. 18, 1967
January, the Berkeley freeway. An L-route up from Oakland and under the last overpass to MLK and Ashby. The winter rains have passed, come and gone like a wet memory. I can’t see it now, but headed south out of town in the opposite direction, under the bright skies an ominous message, for some, is waiting.
Stitched in what looks like black tinsel, or the burnt-out vines of some thirsty eucalyptus creeper, strung-out in the wind. Woven into the pedestrian safety fence, above the breeze of cars on the first overpass out of Berkeley, in material cursive for every Oakland-bound motorist to see, the tattered words: Ea the Rich.
A message for southern travelers and exiles out on the highway. Northbound passengers are blind to Rousseau’s bon mot, as they enter…
Berkeley, the glittering city-state. Crown jewel of the system, the University of California flagship. Happy to be alive and here with the fires of yesterday fading, a soft orange haze at the back of the mind, a forgotten omen. The air outside the rental car is cool and clear, crackling with that familiar static, the California electricity. It propels me down MLK, past Malcom X Elementary, cruising the boulevards of the Sixties dream, to the curb of the Berkeley City Club hotel.
A Beaux-Arts museum haunted by the ghosts of Chaplin and Hearst impersonators, shuffling the dark hallways at 2 a.m. Where a vintage library is housed, along with a bar and lounge, succulents garden, and the vaulted swimming pool whose indoor waters reflect a tunnel image out of Fitzgerald’s imagination.
Where I sleep, a building with history. The Berkeley Women’s social club, now open to male visitors. Amelia Earhart once gave a speech in the lobby.
Today it’s where I rehearse an imaginary speech, in the tiny bedroom overlooking Spanish tiles and pieces of the East Bay. Where my window peers into the windows of others— students glued to their laptops, dim daytime shadows at this this hour, faces glowing later and brighter into the night, across the alleyway.
I’ll never deliver the speech… I was never asked to.
The speech was a thought exercise. Grand delusion… a writing process. Twelve minutes about the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson in drag, glimpsed in a photograph from the Capitol riots. Twelve minutes about a young woman occupying a Senator’s desk, jutting a vape pen through her teeth like a cigarette holder under her red ball cap.
Twelve minutes about an ancient illustration of Elvis Presley that looks exactly like the future of fallen America. A hand-drawing from Seattle, 1957—when Elvis was still lean and humping it under a jet-black hair-do—where the King is fat, blond, and pucker-lipped instead… a jaundiced plump orange wrapped in an oversized suit.
Elvis looks exactly like Donald Trump, according to this picture, traced by a fourteen-year-old boy named James Marshal Hendrix.
It was a twelve-minute screed of wild hallucinations, a sermon weaving visions of divided America out of our past. Speechifying how two-faced, broken-hinged, and contradictory we are. Archetypes and paradoxes, travesties and heroes… Elvis and Hunter. A woman role-playing Gonzo in the Capitol. Thompson and Tucker Carlson sharing dinner over a bottle of wine. Baby Hendrix in Seattle, and old man Trump in Washington.
Nightmares past and future, now come to fruition. Signifying, “the legendary duality—the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts—that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character”—as I would uncannily read in Thompson’s own words, some weeks later… But that’s not why I came here.
I came to Berkeley to meet imaginary friends and colleagues among the living. One of them was a critic named Greil Marcus, who deals in such archetypes. The other was the Pope of Rock n’ Roll himself—Hunter Thompson’s old boss, Jann Wenner. The founder of Rolling Stone, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A special guest speaker tonight, along with old friend Greil, who used to write for Jann and now moderates his speaking engagement at the University. I came to hear them tell how Rolling Stone was born on the streets of Berkeley, in a house on Ashby Avenue, at the height of the Free Speech Movement.
Intriguing, looking forward to Part II