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George harrison pedo stache9/23/2023 Many of the Second Coming’s fans weren’t old enough to drink legally in a bar. Meanwhile things at The Scene weren’t always as they’d promised. “But oh, who I really loved,” Sherri says, “was that female singer.” “I was kind of in awe of Berry Oakley,” says Sherri Wildstein Meadows, who saw the Second Coming play in Willowbranch Park, at the Forest Inn and Jacksonville Beach, then caught the Allman Brothers Band at the Atlanta Pop Festival in 1970. Now Dale Betts led vocals and played congas and Reese Wynans played organ. Wynans gelled so well with the Second Coming, playing at the club called The Scene and at the be-ins in Willowbranch Park, that he stayed on when Dale returned to the band. He’d bought a new organ and also had what he lovingly calls “my old Wurly,” short for Wurlitzer. “As it worked out,” he says, “Dickey’s wife Dale was playing organ with the band and she became pregnant with her first child and when the due date came along, Dickey had to keep playing, even though Dale went into the hospital, so they asked me to come up and fill in for a while.” So he did. Reese Wynans and Berry Oakley, Willowbranch Park, image courtesy Richard Price She leapt across Willowbranch Creek with her longhaired boyfriend and watched him play bass guitar at the Armory downtown and in Willowbranch Park. She and her friends wandered the old streets of Riverside, many of whose wealthy original residents had fled to the suburbs and unwittingly made room for artists and musicians without much money. Growing up in the old neighborhood of Murray Hill, Linda Miller wanted to marry George Harrison of the Beatles. “It was like nothing can be better than this. “You appreciated everything around you and it felt perfect,” she says. You could leave your stuff, get up and walk around, then come back and your stuff would still be there.” That kind of trust was necessary for what Donna calls “oneness.” And an appreciation of presence and the present. “It felt like such a beautiful thing to be with everyone in the park. It featured leftist student protests, San Francisco bands like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.ĭonna Goddard, late 1960s, image courtesy Donna Goddard As prelude to San Francisco’s “Summer of Love,” which made that city’s Haight-Ashbury district the capital of the counterculture, urban hippies and psychedelica, its full name, with obvious pun, was the Human Be-In. The “be-in” was a kind of public-park rock n’ roll gathering that spread quickly across the continent after the first such event in San Francisco in 1967. Which, inadvertently or not, brings us to the “be-in.” It was like a “sit-in,” but more affirmation than protest, emphasizing everyone’s human “being” (or beingness) and the ethos of “Be Here Now,” which Baba Ram Dass would soon title his countercultural spiritual guidebook. There was no fighting, nobody was into politics, thank God, and everything was about music and just being, really, just being.” Now 72 years old, he still speaks fondly of a golden “magical time” that had “a very very special vibe. It’s early afternoon and Byron’s just come in from surfing. Byron Colley today, image courtesy Byron Colley
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