Rainbow Bridge
A Film that Anticipated Reality TV Style
1972 Film
starring Jimi Hendrix
This new and revealing programme provides an incredibly detailed account of how Jimi Hendrix, a legendary guitarist touched by genius, lived his life in the high powered world of 60's Rock 'n Roll. Through rare and exclusive interviews plus explosive performance footage, including the track Hey Joe, Sunshine of your Love and Purple Haze, Feedback explores the inside track of this phenomenal talent.
http://mauifeed.com/maui-news/remembering-rainbow-bridge-extended-mix/
Rainbow Bridge is a 1972 film directed by Chuck Wein that features footage from a Jimi Hendrix concert, and a short piece of conversation between Pat Hartley, Wein and Hendrix. It was mainly financed by Hendrix manager Mike Jeffery, hence his appearance. The film is about Pat Hartley's "spiritual awakening" via a visit to the 'Rainbow Bridge' planetary meditation cult on Maui, where, as part of the proceedings Jimi Hendrix visits to play a concert during a 'Rainbow Bridge' mass meditation/colour/sound "experiment". The "Rainbow Bridge" concert was a free concert by Jimi Hendrix that was held on July 30, 1970, in a horse pasture above Seabury Hall, on the "Upcountry" slopes of Haleakala. The volcano makes up 75% of the island of Maui, Hawaii, although it probably last erupted in the 17th century, it is officially considered as being active.
Or, as Brother Bobby BEL describes it:
Leslie Potts turned on Jimi to LSD in 64 at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach CA.
Mike Hynson chased Jimi around to do the movie. [see Hyson's story below]
I have the Aquarian Flag from the Zodiac around the stage.
I have 2 Rainbow Surf Boards
The Brotherhood was on the FBI most wanted list and some had to hide out in the tent on the right of the stage with the Big Afghani Hookah. Jimi was down for his first set and Eddie Spaghetti gave him a hit of DMT; check out the 2nd set. He was in the Flow.
We had a Coffee Gallery in Pasadena called the "Euphoria" with my partners Bob Thomas and Buddy Morgan in 1965. Bob Did the Dead's Art logos and the Bear was making his first Acid . We tried it out.
I started booking bands to play and Long John and Jerry came down and blew some Tibetan horns.
40 of us got busted at the Euphoria on TV and Newspapers for interfering with a Police officer. I asked a plain clothes cop for a donation; they had a Bus and the press out side. Buddy and I were given a choice, cut our hair and probation or 6 months in the county jail. I was just back from Combat in the first offense in Viet Nam and told them who they thought they were telling to cut his hair? A Psychedelic Ranger? Buddy went to jail.
I went to Haight Ashbury as a fugitive for riding a freight train and not cutting my hair.
The Brotherhood was just Forming at that time at the French Quarters in Anaheim where the original Brotherhood came from. I ran into them in the 7th grade at John C. Fremont Jr. High 1957 Anaheim, Ca., home of Disneyland. There were a few of us fugitives hiding out from the the first snitches Vallalah Ashbrook from Anaheim in San Francisco.
We started the Aquarian Temple and studied to become ministers with the Universal Life Church.
1724 Waller St and Stanyon was our Temple and I became Chris Wheat the 1st Hippie Ministers in the Haight in the Newspapers and TV also Look and Life interviewed us.
Yeah, we hung out with Jimi, on mescaline, played some tunes and surfed. A great Time and a message to turn on to self realization, organic health, happy life that is so widely spread now.
Or, as Brother Bobby BEL describes it:
Leslie Potts turned on Jimi to LSD in 64 at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach CA.
Mike Hynson chased Jimi around to do the movie. [see Hyson's story below]
I have the Aquarian Flag from the Zodiac around the stage.
I have 2 Rainbow Surf Boards
The Brotherhood was on the FBI most wanted list and some had to hide out in the tent on the right of the stage with the Big Afghani Hookah. Jimi was down for his first set and Eddie Spaghetti gave him a hit of DMT; check out the 2nd set. He was in the Flow.
We had a Coffee Gallery in Pasadena called the "Euphoria" with my partners Bob Thomas and Buddy Morgan in 1965. Bob Did the Dead's Art logos and the Bear was making his first Acid . We tried it out.
I started booking bands to play and Long John and Jerry came down and blew some Tibetan horns.
40 of us got busted at the Euphoria on TV and Newspapers for interfering with a Police officer. I asked a plain clothes cop for a donation; they had a Bus and the press out side. Buddy and I were given a choice, cut our hair and probation or 6 months in the county jail. I was just back from Combat in the first offense in Viet Nam and told them who they thought they were telling to cut his hair? A Psychedelic Ranger? Buddy went to jail.
I went to Haight Ashbury as a fugitive for riding a freight train and not cutting my hair.
The Brotherhood was just Forming at that time at the French Quarters in Anaheim where the original Brotherhood came from. I ran into them in the 7th grade at John C. Fremont Jr. High 1957 Anaheim, Ca., home of Disneyland. There were a few of us fugitives hiding out from the the first snitches Vallalah Ashbrook from Anaheim in San Francisco.
We started the Aquarian Temple and studied to become ministers with the Universal Life Church.
1724 Waller St and Stanyon was our Temple and I became Chris Wheat the 1st Hippie Ministers in the Haight in the Newspapers and TV also Look and Life interviewed us.
Yeah, we hung out with Jimi, on mescaline, played some tunes and surfed. A great Time and a message to turn on to self realization, organic health, happy life that is so widely spread now.
HENDRIX 'MODERN MASTERS' PBS FILM
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/jimi-hendrix/film-jimi-hendrix-hear-my-train-a-comin/2756/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/jimi-hendrix/film-jimi-hendrix-hear-my-train-a-comin/2756/
Hear My Train A Comin’ unveils previously unseen performance footage and home movies taken by Hendrix and drummer Mitch Mitchell while sourcing an extensive archive of photographs, drawings, family letters and more to provide new insight into the musician’s personality and genius. The two-hour film uses Hendrix’s own words to tell his story, illustrated through archival interviews and illuminated with commentary from family, well-known friends and musicians including Paul McCartney, band members Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, Billy Cox, long-time sound engineer Eddie Kramer; Steve Winwood, Vernon Reid, Billy Gibbons, Dweezil Zappa and Dave Mason.
The film also features revealing glimpses into Jimi and his era from the three women closest to him: Linda Keith (the girlfriend who introduced Jimi to future manager Chas Chandler), Faye Pridgon (who befriended Hendrix in Harlem in the early 1960s) and Colette Mimram (one of the era’s most influential fashion trendsetters who provided inspiration for Hendrix’s signature look and created such memorable stage costumes as the beaded jacket Hendrix famously wore at Woodstock).
Among the previously unseen treasures in Hear My Train A Comin’ is recently uncovered film footage of Hendrix at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival. American Masters: Jimi Hendrix – Hear My Train A Comin’ is a production of Fuse Films and THIRTEEN’s American Masters in association with WNET. Bob Smeaton is director.
The film also features revealing glimpses into Jimi and his era from the three women closest to him: Linda Keith (the girlfriend who introduced Jimi to future manager Chas Chandler), Faye Pridgon (who befriended Hendrix in Harlem in the early 1960s) and Colette Mimram (one of the era’s most influential fashion trendsetters who provided inspiration for Hendrix’s signature look and created such memorable stage costumes as the beaded jacket Hendrix famously wore at Woodstock).
Among the previously unseen treasures in Hear My Train A Comin’ is recently uncovered film footage of Hendrix at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival. American Masters: Jimi Hendrix – Hear My Train A Comin’ is a production of Fuse Films and THIRTEEN’s American Masters in association with WNET. Bob Smeaton is director.
Jimi had been dead a year, but the revolution--or at least a movie version of it--kept right on jammin' without him.
Less than a month after Hendrix played a free concert on the slopes of Mt. Haleakela, effectively wrapping principal photography for Rainbow Bridge, the flamboyant rock virtuoso accidentally self-immortalized on a deadly cocktail of red wine and barbiturates, choking on his own vomit in a London flat on September 18, 1970.
Within days of Hendrix's death, Mike Hynson, former '60s teen surf prodigy turned indie film producer, got the call from Warner Brothers Studios demanding immediate return of all original footage of Hendrix shot to date. With the lawyers circling, Hynson knew he had to move fast or lose Rainbow Bridge forever. Warner had not only funded the film--a rambling cinematic "happening" loosely based around a spiritual surfing quest--but they also controlled most of Hendrix's music slated for the film's soundtrack.
Hynson returned the canned footage. However, unbeknownst to the Warner suits, Hynson and director Chuck Wein had stashed a working print of Rainbow Bridge for safety.
By late 1971, Hynson had raised enough discreet venture capital to wrangle verbal clearance of Hendrix's music from Warner Brothers and keep his cinematic problem child on life support. After chopping the film down from a six-hour rough cut to 125 minutes, he and Wein took their movie out on the road for a short bootleg tour throughout the Southwest. Lacking a distributor, they went the traditional surf film four-wall route, hiring the halls themselves and advertising the day of the show via hastily Xeroxed handbills.
Early reviews of Rainbow Bridge had been ... mixed. The La Jolla surf tribe, many of its members Hynson's brethren from the old Windansea Surf Club days, lit up and loved it. But in Tucson, AZ, the local paper ran a shrill front-page editorial the day after the premiere, warning parents to keep their kids from seeing the film lest the graduating class of Tucson High, cheerleaders and all, run off en masse to Maui to join a drugged-out occult surfing hippie commune.
Which is to say that Hynson and Wein had achieved something approaching art.
By the time they hit Laguna, a palpable underground buzz preceded them. Around midnight, outside the venerable South Coast Cinema, a large crowd massed on PCH for a sneak-peek premiere. Johnny Gale, laughing long-haired elder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love--a freewheeling crew of spiritual seekers and psychedelic buccaneers--was thoroughly enjoying his birthday party, handpicking the audience at the door to make sure only the most righteous dudes and prettiest girls came through. Several ornate airbrushed boards, all shaped by Mike Hynson, were displayed in the lobby like geodesic trophy kills. These boards--thick pintails featuring severe downrails from nose to tail--were stars in their own right, having been featured throughout the film's surfing sequences.
The premiere was Hynson's present to Gale, a spiritual fellow traveler and brother surfer. The son of a well-to-do Newport marine engineer, the diminutive Gale was a charismatic and flamboyant LSD baron, known to chum the crowd at rock concerts by flinging handfuls of Orange Sunshine tabs--the Brotherhood's premier acid--like dragon seeds to the cheering throngs. Within a few short years, Gale had amassed a fortune through illegal drug sales. Hynson, who bore a passing resemblance to the blond, shoulder-tressed Gale, connected with him years earlier, and by 1969 they'd gone into business together as Rainbow Surfboards in Laguna Beach.
Sprinkled throughout the milling crowd were several federal drug enforcement agents, some in hippie camouflage. Likely among them was Neil Purcell, a young Laguna Beach police officer who was looking to make his career by bringing down the Brotherhood. The agents took notes and methodically built their case against Gale and his drug-running cohorts, who thus far had outfoxed authorities at nearly every turn. This included Hynson, age 28, who had been associated with the Brotherhood since its arrival in Laguna in the mid-'60s.
Paying attention to the music used in surfing films reveals that, by the end of the 1960s, many surfers shunned the now passé vocal and instrumental versions of surf music, and, like many young people at the time, favored psychedelic rock, and even early punk, which seemed to better fit with newer styles of surfing on shorter boards. For example, Jimi Hendrix was favored by many surfers, as is implied in the 1972 film, Rainbow Bridge, in which both Hendrix and surfer Mike Hynson (one of the two lead surfers in Endless Summer) are featured.
Later, films made by and for surfers do occasionally use early 1960s style surf music, but usually to reference older 1960s longboarding styles. The 1960s naming of a genre “surf music” may have even hindered subsequent musical surfers, since so many people believed any surfer would naturally prefer “surf music.” Though a number of notable surfers are also accomplished musicians, and there are professional musicians who are accomplished surfers[, it was not until Jack Johnson turned his attention from competitive surfing and surf films to performing and recording his own songs that a prominent connection between popular music and surfing and a surfing lifestyle was renewed. http://surfingsafari.wordpress.com/background/impact-of-surf-films/
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Facts: Hendrix wasn’t a junkie, but dabbled and tried to stay away from it by emigrating to Hawai to be with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, whose members also infiltrated [Hare Krishnas] Iskcon (for good or bad depending how one views countercultural outlaw heroes). The brotherhood, as seen in the Rainbow Bridge film, are connected to devotees (as one sees them actually doing sankirtana in the film) and they shunned junk and were into LSD and ganja as sacraments and the spiritual and mystical, like Hendrix. He didn’t actually decide on the album cover of Axis Bold as Love, and the painting wasn’t authorized by him but put there anyway.
If the management scene of the Hendrix world had not dragged him back to mainland USA, he would have stayed with the Brotherhood in Hawaii, away from junk and towards a spiritualish life, which one can see he clearly leaned towards. But he was pulled away from the brothers to the mainland and the tour machine and he never made it back to Hawaii in the end but rather to the crematorium.
He visioned the bringing together of classical music and the blues-jazz, sky church music, and was a deeply spiritual man who later shunned the rock n roll gimics, guitar with teeth, sexual pelvic thrusts etc, becoming bored with such shallow stagnated rebellion clichés. He wasn’t even a big drinker of alcohol and prefered reefer and acid to booze and smack and even sought to go beyond these.
"Rainbow Bridge" is important to ISKCON history in that the official ISKCON expose of the brotherhood links to ISKCON talk of the brotherhood being involved around Kulik in the 1975-1977 period in LA and Laguna. But here we see in "Rainbow Bridge" a link between the brotherhood and devotees, in this rather cryptic and encoded countercultural slice of film, if one looks at it deep enough, all in the late 1960s.
Try watching it keeping this in mind and see the references to Hare Krishna on the lips of the Rainbow brothers and on the car where the maha mantra is painted and also in the features of various devotees on the film itself. The question is which devotees and what temple and what is being symbolized here, a big acid and pot deal going on? Jayatirtha wasn’t the only one surely and neither was Rishabadev and co. Surely brotherhood chemists were interested in ISKCON, especially as its founder was once a big chemist and had lots of chemical company contacts even when ISKCON took off big in India.
http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/index.php?showtopic=2161&mode=threaded&pid=48222
If the management scene of the Hendrix world had not dragged him back to mainland USA, he would have stayed with the Brotherhood in Hawaii, away from junk and towards a spiritualish life, which one can see he clearly leaned towards. But he was pulled away from the brothers to the mainland and the tour machine and he never made it back to Hawaii in the end but rather to the crematorium.
He visioned the bringing together of classical music and the blues-jazz, sky church music, and was a deeply spiritual man who later shunned the rock n roll gimics, guitar with teeth, sexual pelvic thrusts etc, becoming bored with such shallow stagnated rebellion clichés. He wasn’t even a big drinker of alcohol and prefered reefer and acid to booze and smack and even sought to go beyond these.
"Rainbow Bridge" is important to ISKCON history in that the official ISKCON expose of the brotherhood links to ISKCON talk of the brotherhood being involved around Kulik in the 1975-1977 period in LA and Laguna. But here we see in "Rainbow Bridge" a link between the brotherhood and devotees, in this rather cryptic and encoded countercultural slice of film, if one looks at it deep enough, all in the late 1960s.
Try watching it keeping this in mind and see the references to Hare Krishna on the lips of the Rainbow brothers and on the car where the maha mantra is painted and also in the features of various devotees on the film itself. The question is which devotees and what temple and what is being symbolized here, a big acid and pot deal going on? Jayatirtha wasn’t the only one surely and neither was Rishabadev and co. Surely brotherhood chemists were interested in ISKCON, especially as its founder was once a big chemist and had lots of chemical company contacts even when ISKCON took off big in India.
http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/index.php?showtopic=2161&mode=threaded&pid=48222
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Rainbow Surfboards got an unexpected publicity boost from Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Wein, a member of Andy Warhol's so-called Factory whom Merryweather had befriended while working as a model in New York. In 1972, while Hynson and Merryweather were living in Maui where most of the Brotherhood had relocated after Laguna Beach became too hot Merryweather suggested to Wein that he direct a Jimi Hendrix concert movie in Maui and even introduced him to Hendrix's manager, Michael Jefferey.
"Chuck wanted to make a movie that was going to have surfing, healers, vegetarians, New Age people, even a space woman," Merryweather says. "Jimi was going to play the music because he was at the top of his game, and Michael was going to surf because he was at the top of his game." The result, 1972's Rainbow Bridge, was billed as a Hendrix concert film because the concert Hendrix played in Maui provides the ending of the movie, much of which actually features surfing by Hynson and his friends, goofy-foot hotshot Dave Nuuhiwa and Leslie Potts. "Gale refused to be in the movie, because he didn't want to have his face on camera," Hynson recalls.
The film's most notorious scene features Hynson and Potts ripping open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, "Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?" When the film opened in Laguna Beach, Hynson gave Gale all the tickets as a birthday present. Half of the audience was rumored to be narcs. "The room smoked up so much you couldn't see the stage," Hynson says. "We had all these Rainbow Surfboards up on the stage, and when the movie showed the board being opened up, it got the police crazy. They were constantly on our ass. Anybody who had a Rainbow Surfboard got pulled over."
* * *
A few months after Rainbow Bridge came out, a multi-agency task force arrested dozens of members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in California, Oregon and Maui, including Gale, who spent the next several months in prison. "He wasn't in for long," Hynson says. "He was like a rabbit." But thanks in part to the Brotherhood's legendary secrecy, the police never knew Hynson's role in the group. Once Gale got out of prison, the two continued to sell surfboards and market the Rainbow brand by opening a Rainbow Juice bar in La Jolla with help from Merryweather. But the business folded after just a few years. "We didn't shortchange anything," Merryweather says. "We got an accounting firm and figured out we were paying people 25 cents to eat the avocado sandwiches."
Meanwhile, Gale had become the biggest cocaine broker in California. Hynson says he didn't know the full extent of Gale's business dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend's house one time when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian marijuana was on its way from Florida. He also recalls that whenever he rode in Gale's car, someone always seemed to be following them. "Not for long, though," Hynson says. "Gale didn't stick around long enough for anyone to chase him."
On June 2, 1982, Gale perished when the car he was driving, Hynson's Mercedes, went off the road in Dana Point. Hynson remains convinced someone either the cops or rival criminals was chasing his friend. The tragedy ended Rainbow Surfboards (it's recently been reincarnated under new ownership) and left Hynson financially strapped. "If you ever had a business project and you're wondering whatever happened to it, it's probably because the other guy is dead," Hynson jokes.
Gale's death devastated Hynson, says Merryweather. "I wasn't with him at the time, but people told me they'd never seen Michael take anything so bad. He just really went sideways."
http://sixties-l.blogspot.com/2009/07/tales-of-brotherhood-of-eternal-love.html
"Chuck wanted to make a movie that was going to have surfing, healers, vegetarians, New Age people, even a space woman," Merryweather says. "Jimi was going to play the music because he was at the top of his game, and Michael was going to surf because he was at the top of his game." The result, 1972's Rainbow Bridge, was billed as a Hendrix concert film because the concert Hendrix played in Maui provides the ending of the movie, much of which actually features surfing by Hynson and his friends, goofy-foot hotshot Dave Nuuhiwa and Leslie Potts. "Gale refused to be in the movie, because he didn't want to have his face on camera," Hynson recalls.
The film's most notorious scene features Hynson and Potts ripping open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, "Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?" When the film opened in Laguna Beach, Hynson gave Gale all the tickets as a birthday present. Half of the audience was rumored to be narcs. "The room smoked up so much you couldn't see the stage," Hynson says. "We had all these Rainbow Surfboards up on the stage, and when the movie showed the board being opened up, it got the police crazy. They were constantly on our ass. Anybody who had a Rainbow Surfboard got pulled over."
* * *
A few months after Rainbow Bridge came out, a multi-agency task force arrested dozens of members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in California, Oregon and Maui, including Gale, who spent the next several months in prison. "He wasn't in for long," Hynson says. "He was like a rabbit." But thanks in part to the Brotherhood's legendary secrecy, the police never knew Hynson's role in the group. Once Gale got out of prison, the two continued to sell surfboards and market the Rainbow brand by opening a Rainbow Juice bar in La Jolla with help from Merryweather. But the business folded after just a few years. "We didn't shortchange anything," Merryweather says. "We got an accounting firm and figured out we were paying people 25 cents to eat the avocado sandwiches."
Meanwhile, Gale had become the biggest cocaine broker in California. Hynson says he didn't know the full extent of Gale's business dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend's house one time when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian marijuana was on its way from Florida. He also recalls that whenever he rode in Gale's car, someone always seemed to be following them. "Not for long, though," Hynson says. "Gale didn't stick around long enough for anyone to chase him."
On June 2, 1982, Gale perished when the car he was driving, Hynson's Mercedes, went off the road in Dana Point. Hynson remains convinced someone either the cops or rival criminals was chasing his friend. The tragedy ended Rainbow Surfboards (it's recently been reincarnated under new ownership) and left Hynson financially strapped. "If you ever had a business project and you're wondering whatever happened to it, it's probably because the other guy is dead," Hynson jokes.
Gale's death devastated Hynson, says Merryweather. "I wasn't with him at the time, but people told me they'd never seen Michael take anything so bad. He just really went sideways."
http://sixties-l.blogspot.com/2009/07/tales-of-brotherhood-of-eternal-love.html
Hynson
Excerpt
CHAPTER 38
THE ROAD TO RAINBOW BRIDGE
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?id=44468
Melinda and I were relaxing with Terry and Nina Stafford on their lanai on Front Street in Lahaina. Melinda's crush on Terry was buried long ago and we all become good friends. We even had an invitation to stay with them any time we were in town. Maui was also the place I came whenever I needed peace and quiet and boy did I need it, thanks to the shitty week I had back home in San Diego.
Michael, Jimi Hendrix' Manager is here, Les Potts burst onto the Stafford's patio almost out of breath. He's at the Pioneer and he wants to buy some acid. Les hightailed it over from the Inn as fast as possible where he and his sun-scorched friends had been trying to hustle someone into loaning them ten grand to open a surf shop. When a middle-aged Englishman with thick coke-bottle glasses, kind of an Austin Powers look-alike, walked up to their table and introduced himself as Hendrix' manager, nobody believed him. But when he mentioned he was interested in investing in their idea, suddenly the guys were all ears. The man then pulled out a small tape recorder to play some of Jimi's new songs and asked where he could score some pot or acid.
Why wouldn't I believe Les? He was this scrappy toe-headed surfer from Huntington Beach that I met at one of the Sunday Sessions and made boards with for a while.
* * * *
Mid-sixties, Hynson was the shaper, says Les. Although I'd studied Sonny Vardemen, Gordie, and Mike Marshall, I was busy trying to figure out what designs would work. Mike already knew. I was still hungry for information so I studied his every move. Shaping is one of those art forms where there is no school. You have to learn hands-on as an apprentice under a master.
* * * *
Les was also part of my crew on Maui. He'd been over in the Islands for a couple of years now after he got out of the service and we usually hooked up when I'd get into town. So it wasn�t strange when he showed up at the Staffords. The coincidence was that he brought up Hendrix after everything I�d been through the week before. I reached in my pocket for some Orange Sunshine, pulled out my stash, and gave Les three hits. Go back to the Pioneer and tell him no charge.
Things started getting shitty nine days earlier when I woke up to a radio announcement in La Jolla. Jimi Hendrix was playing that night at the San Diego Sports Arena. After years of listening to the sounds of Hendrix, from my first splash at the Monterey Pop Festival where he burned his stick, to blowing his arms off at the concerts up in Frisco, Hendrix' music has always been the lead in this psychedelic free-from style of John Coltrane. I felt his style of rock and roll was really a movement, an expression of the human soul and it jived well with the feeling that surfing provided.
Hendrix was just the sound I needed for a surf demo I was making for Bill Bahne. It all started when I passed on an idea to him that George Downing came up with for a replaceable fin. It wasn't like I was ripping George off. There were no existing patent restrictions and Bahne agreed to pay him royalties. Now I'm pretty spontaneous when it comes to designing boards and Bahne, well he's the mathematician. With his keen business sense and an incredible engineering ability, the fin box was introduced through Fins Unlimited.
CHAPTER 38
THE ROAD TO RAINBOW BRIDGE
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?id=44468
Melinda and I were relaxing with Terry and Nina Stafford on their lanai on Front Street in Lahaina. Melinda's crush on Terry was buried long ago and we all become good friends. We even had an invitation to stay with them any time we were in town. Maui was also the place I came whenever I needed peace and quiet and boy did I need it, thanks to the shitty week I had back home in San Diego.
Michael, Jimi Hendrix' Manager is here, Les Potts burst onto the Stafford's patio almost out of breath. He's at the Pioneer and he wants to buy some acid. Les hightailed it over from the Inn as fast as possible where he and his sun-scorched friends had been trying to hustle someone into loaning them ten grand to open a surf shop. When a middle-aged Englishman with thick coke-bottle glasses, kind of an Austin Powers look-alike, walked up to their table and introduced himself as Hendrix' manager, nobody believed him. But when he mentioned he was interested in investing in their idea, suddenly the guys were all ears. The man then pulled out a small tape recorder to play some of Jimi's new songs and asked where he could score some pot or acid.
Why wouldn't I believe Les? He was this scrappy toe-headed surfer from Huntington Beach that I met at one of the Sunday Sessions and made boards with for a while.
* * * *
Mid-sixties, Hynson was the shaper, says Les. Although I'd studied Sonny Vardemen, Gordie, and Mike Marshall, I was busy trying to figure out what designs would work. Mike already knew. I was still hungry for information so I studied his every move. Shaping is one of those art forms where there is no school. You have to learn hands-on as an apprentice under a master.
* * * *
Les was also part of my crew on Maui. He'd been over in the Islands for a couple of years now after he got out of the service and we usually hooked up when I'd get into town. So it wasn�t strange when he showed up at the Staffords. The coincidence was that he brought up Hendrix after everything I�d been through the week before. I reached in my pocket for some Orange Sunshine, pulled out my stash, and gave Les three hits. Go back to the Pioneer and tell him no charge.
Things started getting shitty nine days earlier when I woke up to a radio announcement in La Jolla. Jimi Hendrix was playing that night at the San Diego Sports Arena. After years of listening to the sounds of Hendrix, from my first splash at the Monterey Pop Festival where he burned his stick, to blowing his arms off at the concerts up in Frisco, Hendrix' music has always been the lead in this psychedelic free-from style of John Coltrane. I felt his style of rock and roll was really a movement, an expression of the human soul and it jived well with the feeling that surfing provided.
Hendrix was just the sound I needed for a surf demo I was making for Bill Bahne. It all started when I passed on an idea to him that George Downing came up with for a replaceable fin. It wasn't like I was ripping George off. There were no existing patent restrictions and Bahne agreed to pay him royalties. Now I'm pretty spontaneous when it comes to designing boards and Bahne, well he's the mathematician. With his keen business sense and an incredible engineering ability, the fin box was introduced through Fins Unlimited.
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http://www.surfysurfy.net/2012/10/rainbow-hynson-starman.html
Mike Hynson & BEL
What’s missing from Hynson's Technicolor trip down memory lane are the past 20 or so years of his life. It’s a stretch of time Hynson doesn’t talk about much, partly because he’s not proud of it, but mostly because he doesn’t remember it well, even less so than the heady days of the late-1960s, when he was dropping acid nearly every day with his friends in the Laguna Beach-based band of smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (see “Lords of Acid,” July 8, 2005). Those were strange times indeed, but a lot of fun compared to what came next. In the early 1980s, life went downhill for Hynson when John Gale, one of the Brotherhood’s best surfers and Laguna Beach’s most legendary outlaws, died in a mysterious car crash, thus ruining Hynson emotionally and financially.
Gale was Hynson’s business partner in Rainbow Surfboards, which the two founded in Laguna Beach in 1969, as well as his best friend. Hynson’s drug-addled, rebellious lifestyle had already led to a divorce from wife Melinda Merryweather, a Ford Agency model, actress and art designer, but Gale’s death seemed to push him over the edge from reckless to beyond help. He descended into a depression and drug addiction that lasted decades, ruining his surfing career and alienating him from everyone but his closest friends until only a few years ago.
Now 67, Hynson is muscular and trim from long days spent shaping boards for mostly Japanese customers. He still has a full head of hair, which is pulled back over his scalp into a short Native American-style braid. He’s wearing a black T-shirt adorned with a red Chinese dragon, dusty black jeans and rugged work boots. His face is full of color and breaks easily into a self-deprecating grin. Gone are the gaunt physique and haggard expression on display in photographs taken of him just a decade ago, when People profiled him in an embarrassing article titled “The Endless Bummer.” (The story noted that just a few weeks before Endless Summer 2 was released, Hynson was serving jail time for drug possession.)
It was during one of Hynson’s numerous jail stints, at some point in the 1980s—he’s not sure what year or why he was in jail—that somebody suggested he use his free time to write, a suggestion that, two decades later, led to Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel, an autobiography Hynson co-wrote with Donna Klaasen that was released this month by the Dana Point-based Endless Dreams Publishing. Among other things, the book divulges that Hynson, who has never spoken publicly about the Brotherhood, wasn’t just pals with them, but actually instructed them in the art of using surfboards to smuggle drugs.
“The last time I’d been in jail, I’d started reading for the first time in my life,” Hynson recalls of his autobiographical efforts. “And on this stretch, I just got obsessed with writing.” By the mid-1990s, Hynson had cranked out hundreds of pages of handwritten memoirs, all of it scrawled in pencil on jailhouse paper, which he eventually shared with a few friends at the surf shop down the street from where he now lives, a half-mile from the beach in Encinitas. “A couple of people looked at it and said, ‘Michael, I know you can understand this, but I look at it and I can’t understand a word,’” he says.
Hynson remembers glancing down at the first draft of his autobiography. For the first time, he realized that, after the first few pages, his magnum opus consisted of nothing but incomprehensible chicken-scratch scrawl, less a series of words and punctuation marks than a never-ending pattern of zigzag lines, like heart-monitor readings. “It was just so dysfunctional,” he says, chuckling.
* * *
Unlike the blurry events of the past few decades, the highlights of Hynson’s early life are still very vivid in his mind. Michael Lear Hynson was born in the Northern California coastal town of Crescent City in 1942, a Navy brat whose father survived kamikaze attacks as a radioman in World War II. Mike grew up in San Diego and Hawaii, never staying in one place long enough to make friends. His thrill-seeking lifestyle began while living with his mother at a trailer park when he was just 2 years old.
One morning, he crawled out the door while his mother wasn’t looking and discovered that the trailer next door had moved. He grabbed a 250-volt electrical plug that was lying on the ground and stuck it in his mouth. According to Hynson, the shock split his tongue and made it hard for him to learn how to speak. “I developed my own unique way of talking, and sometimes, I mumble and stumble,” he says. “Then, when I was 5, I was climbing these stairs at Imperial Beach, and this friend of mine had a hammer in his hand. My mother said something behind us, and he turned, and the claw of the hammer went right into the temple of my head.”
The next thing Hynson knew, he was being flown by helicopter to San Diego’s nearby naval base. He remembers floating above himself, looking down at his body surrounded by doctors, all of whom left the room. “I remember being really comfortable and just tripping, you know,” he says, “and then my mother turned around to leave the room, and I screamed into my body, ‘Where are you going?’ And my mother goes, ‘He’s alive!’ and the doctors came back in, and they got me back.” Hynson says he likes to joke that the hammer incident explains why he often seems to lose his train of thought nowadays. “Everybody who knows me knows that I go off on tangents,” he says. “But I’m just making an excuse for myself.”
Hynson spent most of his elementary-school years in Honolulu, where, he says, he never picked up a surfboard. It wasn’t until he was in junior-high school in San Diego that he took up surfing with some older kids who surfed at Pacific Beach, called themselves the Sultans and wore matching purple-nylon jackets. After watching the older kids a few times, he borrowed a board. Hynson recalls standing up on his first wave, not realizing how fast he was moving until he looked at the nearby pier and saw wooden posts rushing by in a blur. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “It was so far out. I couldn’t sleep, and I just got into it, borrowing boards and stealing them and everything.”
Stealing surfboards is how Hynson met the man who would give him his first big break in the world of surfboard shaping, Hobie Alter, an early surf pioneer and inventor of the Hobie Cat, which is now the world’s top-selling small catamaran. “I first met Mike when he stole some of my boards,” Alter says. “The cops wanted to press charges, but Linda Benson, one of the finest surfer gals, called me and said Mike wasn’t that bad.” Alter agreed to drop the charges if Hynson would return the boards and later gave him a job as a shaper.
Hynson’s first board was an 11-foot plank of balsa wood that he spotted while collecting weeds in the front yard of a house in Mission Beach. The board’s owner told him he could have the board if he wanted it, so Hynson and a friend lugged it to the friend’s garage, where Hynson began whittling away. “I had no idea what I was doing, and his parents were getting angry because of all this dust and resin and mess, but it turned out to be a 7-foot-11-inch board. It was a hot little board, and everyone loved it who rode it.”
Hynson suddenly found his board-shaping skills very much in demand. He became a top shaper for Gordon and Smith Surfboards in San Diego, where he designed and produced his trademark “RedFin” boards. He also began hanging out with all the best surfers in Southern California, including Corky Carroll, Phil Edwards, Nat Young and Robert August. “As a surfer, Mike was very good,” recalls Carroll, now TheOrange County Register’s surfing columnist. “He was not a guy that you had to worry about beating you in a contest, but he knew how to ride a wave. He also had a kind of charisma about him that seemed to attract ‘followers,’ so to speak.”
One person who began following Hynson’s surf career was Bruce Brown, a film director who, by the early 1960s, was filming all the big surf contests in Southern California and Hawaii. According to Hynson, Brown was getting tired of the fact that all the surf movies being made showed the same group of surfers on the same group of waves. “There was no story to any of these movies,” Hynson says. Brown came up with the concept of taking two surfers—one blond and right-footed (Hynson) and one dark-haired goofy-footer—August fit the part—and following them around the world, from California to Europe and Africa, in search of the perfect wave.
The details of their epic quest, which culminates with Hynson surfing a beautiful right-breaking wave at Cape St. Francis in South Africa, are familiar to anyone who has seen The Endless Summer, which remains iconic more than 40 years later. The film not only exposed the sport to a nationwide audience, helping export the industry beyond California and Hawaii, but it also helped shift the sport itself from a handful of well-known beaches to a constant quest for pristine waves in exotic locales. Hynson recalls the trip as one of the most fun adventures in his life, although part of the sense of adventure was the fact that he smuggled an ounce of pot with him as he flew around the world.
“I was young, stupid and loaded,” Hynson says. “I smoked pot everywhere. I had a roll of bennies, which I took with me also, so when we had to drive somewhere, guess who stayed up all night?”
Before the movie was released theatrically in 1966, Hynson accompanied Brown and August, as well as several other surf legends, including Carroll, on a nationwide road trip to promote the film. “We’d go into towns, and every time we’d stop for gas, Corky and I would jump out and go skateboarding,” Hynson says. “We really caused a scene because skateboarding hadn’t reached the inner part of the States yet.” As the trip wore on, the audiences were growing larger, and before Hynson realized it, the movie had become a hit. (At latest count, The Endless Summer has grossed $30 million.) Hynson claims that Brown had promised him and August that if the movie did well, everyone would share in the good fortune.
“It wasn’t until I grabbed Robert and went to LA and talked to a lawyer that I realized this guy was fucking me left and right,” Hynson says. In fact, Hynson had only become suspicious after his then-girlfriend Merryweather, whom he had just met at San Diego’s Windansea beach, asked him about his allowing Brown to use his likeness on film. “He’d never signed a release,” says Merryweather, now a civic activist in La Jolla. Merryweather’s father, Hubert, was the president of Arizona’s state senate; Barry Goldwater was her godfather. “I told Mike my father knew a great lawyer up in Hollywood, and let’s go up and see him.”
Hynson brought August with him to see the attorney, who insisted they each deserved a third of the profit from The Endless Summer. Hynson claims Brown refused to do that, instead offering each surfer $5,000, a new car and help getting set up in business. While August accepted the deal, Hynson says, he refused. (Neither Brown nor August responded to written requests for comment for this story, but Alter says Brown gave Hynson the gift of fame he still enjoys. “Nobody knew who Mike was back then,” he says. “Bruce took all the risk, and I’ve never met anybody more forthright and honest.”) The dispute ended Hynson’s friendships with Brown and, eventually, August. Enraged by what he felt was Brown’s betrayal, Hynson dropped out for a while, leaving California with Merryweather to spend half a year surfing big waves on Oahu’s North Shore.
* * *
One of the surfers Hynson got to know in Hawaii was Chuck Mundell, a high-school dropout from Huntington Beach. Mundell admired Hynson and wanted him to meet a good friend of his named John Griggs, who was living with a bunch of friends in a stone building in Orange County’s Modjeska Canyon. Griggs and his friends, most of whom were former boozers, brawlers and heroin addicts from Anaheim, had begun experimenting with a new drug that Griggs had stolen at gunpoint from a Hollywood film producer: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).
Until October 1966, acid was legal in California, and Griggs and his group, who called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, believed that just as it had cured them of their addictions and violent behavior, it could also transform American society into a glorious utopia. They were heavily influenced by Harvard professor Timothy Leary, he of the famous exhortation “Turn on, tune in, drop out”—and who would later describe Griggs as the “holiest person who has ever lived in this country.”
Before Griggs invited Leary to join his group, which in early 1967 moved south to Laguna Canyon, to a neighborhood Griggs would christen “Dodge City” because of the constant skirmishes with the local forces of law and order, Hynson was Griggs’ most famous disciple. “Griggs had gold flashing out of his eyes and tongue, these words; he was just a magical little guy,” Hynson says. Accompanied by Merryweather, Hynson dropped his first acid with Griggs and several other Brotherhood members at Black’s Beach near La Jolla.
The experience brought him back to the hospital room where he’d nearly died as a child. It took Hynson a few trips to get beyond that near-death experience, but when that happened, he felt reborn with a new sense of spiritual purpose. “Those guys turned me on,” he says. “Things were happening. I remember Johnny and I walking down Haight-Ashbury [in San Francisco], and he got some acid from somebody, and the whole street was loaded with people doing their own hippie thing. It was really going on.”
Griggs had a plan: open a psychedelic spiritual and cultural center in Laguna Beach that would turn the town into a Southern California version of Haight-Ashbury. To finance the construction of Mystic Arts World, the store that would serve as that center, Griggs relied on cash from the Brotherhood’s burgeoning marijuana-smuggling operation.
“One day, I walked into this warehouse with Johnny and saw 50 tons of pot,” Hynson says. “I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I was there. I remember thinking, ‘It’s not going to get any better than this, and it’s not going to get any worse.’”
But Hynson had another idea for how Griggs could raise money: Why not use surfboards to smuggle hash from the Middle East or India? After all, nobody knew anything about surfing in India, so customs wouldn’t know if, for example, a surfboard weighed 20 or 30 pounds more than it should. Hynson suggested the idea to Griggs’ friend Dave Hall, who promptly borrowed a board and set off for Nepal, returning a few weeks later with the board—and the best hash anyone in Laguna Beach had ever smoked.
On his next trip, Hall invited Hynson to come along, which is how Hynson found himself struggling to fill three surfboards with hash oil late one night in New Delhi. The trip was a success, and the cash raised helped make Griggs’ dream a reality. “I wasn’t going to sell it or anything,” Hynson says. “I just gave it to those guys, and it bankrolled Mystic Arts. It was an honor, you know.”
* * *
During the next several years, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love established itself as both America’s top hashish-smuggling ring—with up to a dozen hash-stuffed Volkswagen buses and Land Rovers being shipped back from Afghanistan at any given moment—and the country’s top LSD-distribution ring. Leary moved to Laguna Beach and later accompanied Griggs to a mountain commune in Idyllwild, where Griggs died of an overdose of crystallized psilocybin in August 1969. Hynson stayed away from Dodge City as much as possible because Leary and the Brotherhood attracted too much heat.
He let his guard down once, however, when he and Merryweather sped through Laguna Canyon smoking a joint. A cop pulled them over, smelled the weed and arrested them both. At the station, the officer rifled through Merryweather’s belongings. “In my purse, I had a little Buddha, a prayer book and beads, some patchouli oil and incense, and a Murine bottle full of LSD,” Merryweather recalls. “The cop ingested it through his fingers and never got around to booking us.” In the morning, another officer arrived at the station, slack-jawed at the sight of his colleague, who reeked of patchouli, sitting with glazed eyes in front of a Buddha. “They let us the hell out of there right away,” Hynson says.
Not surprisingly, much of the late 1960s is a blur to Hynson. “It’s a fog,” he says. “There are a few years when I know I was there, but I don’t know what happened.” Although Griggs’ untimely death saddened Hynson, he’d already become best friends with a talented young surfer who also happened to be Dodge City’s biggest drug dealer, John Gale. In 1969, the two opened their own company, Rainbow Surfboards. Theirs were among the first truly shredding shortboards to hit the waves in Southern California and Hawaii. “Mike was one of the surfboard shapers in the 1960s who could make boards that worked,” recalls Carroll. “There were better craftsmen around, guys who could make ‘perfect boards,’ but Mike had the gift to make ones that just rode great.’”
Rainbow Surfboards got an unexpected publicity boost from Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Wein, a member of Andy Warhol’s so-called Factory whom Merryweather had befriended while working as a model in New York. In 1972, while Hynson and Merryweather were living in Maui—where most of the Brotherhood had relocated after Laguna Beach became too hot—Merryweather suggested to Wein that he direct a Jimi Hendrix concert movie in Maui and even introduced him to Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jefferey.
“Chuck wanted to make a movie that was going to have surfing, healers, vegetarians, New Age people, even a space woman,” Merryweather says. “Jimi was going to play the music because he was at the top of his game, and Michael was going to surf because he was at the top of his game.” The result, 1972’s Rainbow Bridge, was billed as a Hendrix concert film because the concert Hendrix played in Maui provides the ending of the movie, much of which actually features surfing by Hynson and his friends, goofy-foot hotshot Dave Nuuhiwa and Leslie Potts. “Gale refused to be in the movie, because he didn’t want to have his face on camera,” Hynson recalls.
The film’s most notorious scene features Hynson and Potts ripping open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, “Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?” When the film opened in Laguna Beach, Hynson gave Gale all the tickets as a birthday present. Half of the audience was rumored to be narcs. “The room smoked up so much you couldn’t see the stage,” Hynson says. “We had all these Rainbow Surfboards up on the stage, and when the movie showed the board being opened up, it got the police crazy. They were constantly on our ass. Anybody who had a Rainbow Surfboard got pulled over.”
* * *
A few months after Rainbow Bridge came out, a multi-agency task force arrested dozens of members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in California, Oregon and Maui, including Gale, who spent the next several months in prison. “He wasn’t in for long,” Hynson says. “He was like a rabbit.” But thanks in part to the Brotherhood’s legendary secrecy, the police never knew Hynson’s role in the group. Once Gale got out of prison, the two continued to sell surfboards and market the Rainbow brand by opening a Rainbow Juice bar in La Jolla with help from Merryweather. But the business folded after just a few years. “We didn’t shortchange anything,” Merryweather says. “We got an accounting firm and figured out we were paying people 25 cents to eat the avocado sandwiches.”
Meanwhile, Gale had become the biggest cocaine broker in California. Hynson says he didn’t know the full extent of Gale’s business dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend’s house one time when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian marijuana was on its way from Florida. He also recalls that whenever he rode in Gale’s car, someone always seemed to be following them. “Not for long, though,” Hynson says. “Gale didn’t stick around long enough for anyone to chase him.”
On June 2, 1982, Gale perished when the car he was driving, Hynson’s Mercedes, went off the road in Dana Point. Hynson remains convinced someone—either the cops or rival criminals—was chasing his friend. The tragedy ended Rainbow Surfboards (it’s recently been reincarnated under new ownership) and left Hynson financially strapped. “If you ever had a business project and you’re wondering whatever happened to it, it’s probably because the other guy is dead,” Hynson jokes.
Gale’s death devastated Hynson, says Merryweather. “I wasn’t with him at the time, but people told me they’d never seen Michael take anything so bad. He just really went sideways.”
Hynson spent the next two decades broke, strung out on coke and crystal methamphetamine, bouncing between jail and sleeping in alleys and garages in San Diego. “I got tripped up on my probation, you see,” he says, his voice trailing off as it often does when he attempts to make sense out of what happened to his life. “You know, it just snowballed. I hit rock-bottom, and then stayed there for a while.”
Hynson isn’t exactly sure how he finally managed to pull himself out of the downward spiral, although he credits ex-wife Merryweather and current girlfriend Carol Hannigan with being “angels” in his life. “It’s just been a gradual process of coming back to reality, and I haven’t stopped since,” he says. “One day, I realized I had a driver’s license with my own address and a telephone number. I even had a bank account. That’s when I realized I was back in society again.”
Thanks to the booming market for American-designed surfboards in Japan, Hynson is doing brisk business there. “There’s really no money in surfboards,” he says. “But thank God for the Japanese.” Meanwhile, Hynson hopes to sell the first 1,000 signed copies of his book for $350 each, which would raise enough cash to print many thousands of additional copies. Eventually, he wants to help publish art books by local artists such as Lance Jost and Bill Ogden, whom he’s known since his Laguna Beach days. “The more books we sell, the more the price goes down,” he says. “I don’t have any money right now, but I’m taking every cent I have, and we are just going to snowball this thing. If I can just get some juice, I’m going to have some fun.”
Nick Schou’, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.
Gale was Hynson’s business partner in Rainbow Surfboards, which the two founded in Laguna Beach in 1969, as well as his best friend. Hynson’s drug-addled, rebellious lifestyle had already led to a divorce from wife Melinda Merryweather, a Ford Agency model, actress and art designer, but Gale’s death seemed to push him over the edge from reckless to beyond help. He descended into a depression and drug addiction that lasted decades, ruining his surfing career and alienating him from everyone but his closest friends until only a few years ago.
Now 67, Hynson is muscular and trim from long days spent shaping boards for mostly Japanese customers. He still has a full head of hair, which is pulled back over his scalp into a short Native American-style braid. He’s wearing a black T-shirt adorned with a red Chinese dragon, dusty black jeans and rugged work boots. His face is full of color and breaks easily into a self-deprecating grin. Gone are the gaunt physique and haggard expression on display in photographs taken of him just a decade ago, when People profiled him in an embarrassing article titled “The Endless Bummer.” (The story noted that just a few weeks before Endless Summer 2 was released, Hynson was serving jail time for drug possession.)
It was during one of Hynson’s numerous jail stints, at some point in the 1980s—he’s not sure what year or why he was in jail—that somebody suggested he use his free time to write, a suggestion that, two decades later, led to Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel, an autobiography Hynson co-wrote with Donna Klaasen that was released this month by the Dana Point-based Endless Dreams Publishing. Among other things, the book divulges that Hynson, who has never spoken publicly about the Brotherhood, wasn’t just pals with them, but actually instructed them in the art of using surfboards to smuggle drugs.
“The last time I’d been in jail, I’d started reading for the first time in my life,” Hynson recalls of his autobiographical efforts. “And on this stretch, I just got obsessed with writing.” By the mid-1990s, Hynson had cranked out hundreds of pages of handwritten memoirs, all of it scrawled in pencil on jailhouse paper, which he eventually shared with a few friends at the surf shop down the street from where he now lives, a half-mile from the beach in Encinitas. “A couple of people looked at it and said, ‘Michael, I know you can understand this, but I look at it and I can’t understand a word,’” he says.
Hynson remembers glancing down at the first draft of his autobiography. For the first time, he realized that, after the first few pages, his magnum opus consisted of nothing but incomprehensible chicken-scratch scrawl, less a series of words and punctuation marks than a never-ending pattern of zigzag lines, like heart-monitor readings. “It was just so dysfunctional,” he says, chuckling.
* * *
Unlike the blurry events of the past few decades, the highlights of Hynson’s early life are still very vivid in his mind. Michael Lear Hynson was born in the Northern California coastal town of Crescent City in 1942, a Navy brat whose father survived kamikaze attacks as a radioman in World War II. Mike grew up in San Diego and Hawaii, never staying in one place long enough to make friends. His thrill-seeking lifestyle began while living with his mother at a trailer park when he was just 2 years old.
One morning, he crawled out the door while his mother wasn’t looking and discovered that the trailer next door had moved. He grabbed a 250-volt electrical plug that was lying on the ground and stuck it in his mouth. According to Hynson, the shock split his tongue and made it hard for him to learn how to speak. “I developed my own unique way of talking, and sometimes, I mumble and stumble,” he says. “Then, when I was 5, I was climbing these stairs at Imperial Beach, and this friend of mine had a hammer in his hand. My mother said something behind us, and he turned, and the claw of the hammer went right into the temple of my head.”
The next thing Hynson knew, he was being flown by helicopter to San Diego’s nearby naval base. He remembers floating above himself, looking down at his body surrounded by doctors, all of whom left the room. “I remember being really comfortable and just tripping, you know,” he says, “and then my mother turned around to leave the room, and I screamed into my body, ‘Where are you going?’ And my mother goes, ‘He’s alive!’ and the doctors came back in, and they got me back.” Hynson says he likes to joke that the hammer incident explains why he often seems to lose his train of thought nowadays. “Everybody who knows me knows that I go off on tangents,” he says. “But I’m just making an excuse for myself.”
Hynson spent most of his elementary-school years in Honolulu, where, he says, he never picked up a surfboard. It wasn’t until he was in junior-high school in San Diego that he took up surfing with some older kids who surfed at Pacific Beach, called themselves the Sultans and wore matching purple-nylon jackets. After watching the older kids a few times, he borrowed a board. Hynson recalls standing up on his first wave, not realizing how fast he was moving until he looked at the nearby pier and saw wooden posts rushing by in a blur. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “It was so far out. I couldn’t sleep, and I just got into it, borrowing boards and stealing them and everything.”
Stealing surfboards is how Hynson met the man who would give him his first big break in the world of surfboard shaping, Hobie Alter, an early surf pioneer and inventor of the Hobie Cat, which is now the world’s top-selling small catamaran. “I first met Mike when he stole some of my boards,” Alter says. “The cops wanted to press charges, but Linda Benson, one of the finest surfer gals, called me and said Mike wasn’t that bad.” Alter agreed to drop the charges if Hynson would return the boards and later gave him a job as a shaper.
Hynson’s first board was an 11-foot plank of balsa wood that he spotted while collecting weeds in the front yard of a house in Mission Beach. The board’s owner told him he could have the board if he wanted it, so Hynson and a friend lugged it to the friend’s garage, where Hynson began whittling away. “I had no idea what I was doing, and his parents were getting angry because of all this dust and resin and mess, but it turned out to be a 7-foot-11-inch board. It was a hot little board, and everyone loved it who rode it.”
Hynson suddenly found his board-shaping skills very much in demand. He became a top shaper for Gordon and Smith Surfboards in San Diego, where he designed and produced his trademark “RedFin” boards. He also began hanging out with all the best surfers in Southern California, including Corky Carroll, Phil Edwards, Nat Young and Robert August. “As a surfer, Mike was very good,” recalls Carroll, now TheOrange County Register’s surfing columnist. “He was not a guy that you had to worry about beating you in a contest, but he knew how to ride a wave. He also had a kind of charisma about him that seemed to attract ‘followers,’ so to speak.”
One person who began following Hynson’s surf career was Bruce Brown, a film director who, by the early 1960s, was filming all the big surf contests in Southern California and Hawaii. According to Hynson, Brown was getting tired of the fact that all the surf movies being made showed the same group of surfers on the same group of waves. “There was no story to any of these movies,” Hynson says. Brown came up with the concept of taking two surfers—one blond and right-footed (Hynson) and one dark-haired goofy-footer—August fit the part—and following them around the world, from California to Europe and Africa, in search of the perfect wave.
The details of their epic quest, which culminates with Hynson surfing a beautiful right-breaking wave at Cape St. Francis in South Africa, are familiar to anyone who has seen The Endless Summer, which remains iconic more than 40 years later. The film not only exposed the sport to a nationwide audience, helping export the industry beyond California and Hawaii, but it also helped shift the sport itself from a handful of well-known beaches to a constant quest for pristine waves in exotic locales. Hynson recalls the trip as one of the most fun adventures in his life, although part of the sense of adventure was the fact that he smuggled an ounce of pot with him as he flew around the world.
“I was young, stupid and loaded,” Hynson says. “I smoked pot everywhere. I had a roll of bennies, which I took with me also, so when we had to drive somewhere, guess who stayed up all night?”
Before the movie was released theatrically in 1966, Hynson accompanied Brown and August, as well as several other surf legends, including Carroll, on a nationwide road trip to promote the film. “We’d go into towns, and every time we’d stop for gas, Corky and I would jump out and go skateboarding,” Hynson says. “We really caused a scene because skateboarding hadn’t reached the inner part of the States yet.” As the trip wore on, the audiences were growing larger, and before Hynson realized it, the movie had become a hit. (At latest count, The Endless Summer has grossed $30 million.) Hynson claims that Brown had promised him and August that if the movie did well, everyone would share in the good fortune.
“It wasn’t until I grabbed Robert and went to LA and talked to a lawyer that I realized this guy was fucking me left and right,” Hynson says. In fact, Hynson had only become suspicious after his then-girlfriend Merryweather, whom he had just met at San Diego’s Windansea beach, asked him about his allowing Brown to use his likeness on film. “He’d never signed a release,” says Merryweather, now a civic activist in La Jolla. Merryweather’s father, Hubert, was the president of Arizona’s state senate; Barry Goldwater was her godfather. “I told Mike my father knew a great lawyer up in Hollywood, and let’s go up and see him.”
Hynson brought August with him to see the attorney, who insisted they each deserved a third of the profit from The Endless Summer. Hynson claims Brown refused to do that, instead offering each surfer $5,000, a new car and help getting set up in business. While August accepted the deal, Hynson says, he refused. (Neither Brown nor August responded to written requests for comment for this story, but Alter says Brown gave Hynson the gift of fame he still enjoys. “Nobody knew who Mike was back then,” he says. “Bruce took all the risk, and I’ve never met anybody more forthright and honest.”) The dispute ended Hynson’s friendships with Brown and, eventually, August. Enraged by what he felt was Brown’s betrayal, Hynson dropped out for a while, leaving California with Merryweather to spend half a year surfing big waves on Oahu’s North Shore.
* * *
One of the surfers Hynson got to know in Hawaii was Chuck Mundell, a high-school dropout from Huntington Beach. Mundell admired Hynson and wanted him to meet a good friend of his named John Griggs, who was living with a bunch of friends in a stone building in Orange County’s Modjeska Canyon. Griggs and his friends, most of whom were former boozers, brawlers and heroin addicts from Anaheim, had begun experimenting with a new drug that Griggs had stolen at gunpoint from a Hollywood film producer: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).
Until October 1966, acid was legal in California, and Griggs and his group, who called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, believed that just as it had cured them of their addictions and violent behavior, it could also transform American society into a glorious utopia. They were heavily influenced by Harvard professor Timothy Leary, he of the famous exhortation “Turn on, tune in, drop out”—and who would later describe Griggs as the “holiest person who has ever lived in this country.”
Before Griggs invited Leary to join his group, which in early 1967 moved south to Laguna Canyon, to a neighborhood Griggs would christen “Dodge City” because of the constant skirmishes with the local forces of law and order, Hynson was Griggs’ most famous disciple. “Griggs had gold flashing out of his eyes and tongue, these words; he was just a magical little guy,” Hynson says. Accompanied by Merryweather, Hynson dropped his first acid with Griggs and several other Brotherhood members at Black’s Beach near La Jolla.
The experience brought him back to the hospital room where he’d nearly died as a child. It took Hynson a few trips to get beyond that near-death experience, but when that happened, he felt reborn with a new sense of spiritual purpose. “Those guys turned me on,” he says. “Things were happening. I remember Johnny and I walking down Haight-Ashbury [in San Francisco], and he got some acid from somebody, and the whole street was loaded with people doing their own hippie thing. It was really going on.”
Griggs had a plan: open a psychedelic spiritual and cultural center in Laguna Beach that would turn the town into a Southern California version of Haight-Ashbury. To finance the construction of Mystic Arts World, the store that would serve as that center, Griggs relied on cash from the Brotherhood’s burgeoning marijuana-smuggling operation.
“One day, I walked into this warehouse with Johnny and saw 50 tons of pot,” Hynson says. “I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I was there. I remember thinking, ‘It’s not going to get any better than this, and it’s not going to get any worse.’”
But Hynson had another idea for how Griggs could raise money: Why not use surfboards to smuggle hash from the Middle East or India? After all, nobody knew anything about surfing in India, so customs wouldn’t know if, for example, a surfboard weighed 20 or 30 pounds more than it should. Hynson suggested the idea to Griggs’ friend Dave Hall, who promptly borrowed a board and set off for Nepal, returning a few weeks later with the board—and the best hash anyone in Laguna Beach had ever smoked.
On his next trip, Hall invited Hynson to come along, which is how Hynson found himself struggling to fill three surfboards with hash oil late one night in New Delhi. The trip was a success, and the cash raised helped make Griggs’ dream a reality. “I wasn’t going to sell it or anything,” Hynson says. “I just gave it to those guys, and it bankrolled Mystic Arts. It was an honor, you know.”
* * *
During the next several years, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love established itself as both America’s top hashish-smuggling ring—with up to a dozen hash-stuffed Volkswagen buses and Land Rovers being shipped back from Afghanistan at any given moment—and the country’s top LSD-distribution ring. Leary moved to Laguna Beach and later accompanied Griggs to a mountain commune in Idyllwild, where Griggs died of an overdose of crystallized psilocybin in August 1969. Hynson stayed away from Dodge City as much as possible because Leary and the Brotherhood attracted too much heat.
He let his guard down once, however, when he and Merryweather sped through Laguna Canyon smoking a joint. A cop pulled them over, smelled the weed and arrested them both. At the station, the officer rifled through Merryweather’s belongings. “In my purse, I had a little Buddha, a prayer book and beads, some patchouli oil and incense, and a Murine bottle full of LSD,” Merryweather recalls. “The cop ingested it through his fingers and never got around to booking us.” In the morning, another officer arrived at the station, slack-jawed at the sight of his colleague, who reeked of patchouli, sitting with glazed eyes in front of a Buddha. “They let us the hell out of there right away,” Hynson says.
Not surprisingly, much of the late 1960s is a blur to Hynson. “It’s a fog,” he says. “There are a few years when I know I was there, but I don’t know what happened.” Although Griggs’ untimely death saddened Hynson, he’d already become best friends with a talented young surfer who also happened to be Dodge City’s biggest drug dealer, John Gale. In 1969, the two opened their own company, Rainbow Surfboards. Theirs were among the first truly shredding shortboards to hit the waves in Southern California and Hawaii. “Mike was one of the surfboard shapers in the 1960s who could make boards that worked,” recalls Carroll. “There were better craftsmen around, guys who could make ‘perfect boards,’ but Mike had the gift to make ones that just rode great.’”
Rainbow Surfboards got an unexpected publicity boost from Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Wein, a member of Andy Warhol’s so-called Factory whom Merryweather had befriended while working as a model in New York. In 1972, while Hynson and Merryweather were living in Maui—where most of the Brotherhood had relocated after Laguna Beach became too hot—Merryweather suggested to Wein that he direct a Jimi Hendrix concert movie in Maui and even introduced him to Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jefferey.
“Chuck wanted to make a movie that was going to have surfing, healers, vegetarians, New Age people, even a space woman,” Merryweather says. “Jimi was going to play the music because he was at the top of his game, and Michael was going to surf because he was at the top of his game.” The result, 1972’s Rainbow Bridge, was billed as a Hendrix concert film because the concert Hendrix played in Maui provides the ending of the movie, much of which actually features surfing by Hynson and his friends, goofy-foot hotshot Dave Nuuhiwa and Leslie Potts. “Gale refused to be in the movie, because he didn’t want to have his face on camera,” Hynson recalls.
The film’s most notorious scene features Hynson and Potts ripping open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, “Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?” When the film opened in Laguna Beach, Hynson gave Gale all the tickets as a birthday present. Half of the audience was rumored to be narcs. “The room smoked up so much you couldn’t see the stage,” Hynson says. “We had all these Rainbow Surfboards up on the stage, and when the movie showed the board being opened up, it got the police crazy. They were constantly on our ass. Anybody who had a Rainbow Surfboard got pulled over.”
* * *
A few months after Rainbow Bridge came out, a multi-agency task force arrested dozens of members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in California, Oregon and Maui, including Gale, who spent the next several months in prison. “He wasn’t in for long,” Hynson says. “He was like a rabbit.” But thanks in part to the Brotherhood’s legendary secrecy, the police never knew Hynson’s role in the group. Once Gale got out of prison, the two continued to sell surfboards and market the Rainbow brand by opening a Rainbow Juice bar in La Jolla with help from Merryweather. But the business folded after just a few years. “We didn’t shortchange anything,” Merryweather says. “We got an accounting firm and figured out we were paying people 25 cents to eat the avocado sandwiches.”
Meanwhile, Gale had become the biggest cocaine broker in California. Hynson says he didn’t know the full extent of Gale’s business dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend’s house one time when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian marijuana was on its way from Florida. He also recalls that whenever he rode in Gale’s car, someone always seemed to be following them. “Not for long, though,” Hynson says. “Gale didn’t stick around long enough for anyone to chase him.”
On June 2, 1982, Gale perished when the car he was driving, Hynson’s Mercedes, went off the road in Dana Point. Hynson remains convinced someone—either the cops or rival criminals—was chasing his friend. The tragedy ended Rainbow Surfboards (it’s recently been reincarnated under new ownership) and left Hynson financially strapped. “If you ever had a business project and you’re wondering whatever happened to it, it’s probably because the other guy is dead,” Hynson jokes.
Gale’s death devastated Hynson, says Merryweather. “I wasn’t with him at the time, but people told me they’d never seen Michael take anything so bad. He just really went sideways.”
Hynson spent the next two decades broke, strung out on coke and crystal methamphetamine, bouncing between jail and sleeping in alleys and garages in San Diego. “I got tripped up on my probation, you see,” he says, his voice trailing off as it often does when he attempts to make sense out of what happened to his life. “You know, it just snowballed. I hit rock-bottom, and then stayed there for a while.”
Hynson isn’t exactly sure how he finally managed to pull himself out of the downward spiral, although he credits ex-wife Merryweather and current girlfriend Carol Hannigan with being “angels” in his life. “It’s just been a gradual process of coming back to reality, and I haven’t stopped since,” he says. “One day, I realized I had a driver’s license with my own address and a telephone number. I even had a bank account. That’s when I realized I was back in society again.”
Thanks to the booming market for American-designed surfboards in Japan, Hynson is doing brisk business there. “There’s really no money in surfboards,” he says. “But thank God for the Japanese.” Meanwhile, Hynson hopes to sell the first 1,000 signed copies of his book for $350 each, which would raise enough cash to print many thousands of additional copies. Eventually, he wants to help publish art books by local artists such as Lance Jost and Bill Ogden, whom he’s known since his Laguna Beach days. “The more books we sell, the more the price goes down,” he says. “I don’t have any money right now, but I’m taking every cent I have, and we are just going to snowball this thing. If I can just get some juice, I’m going to have some fun.”
Nick Schou’, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.
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http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/index.php?showtopic=2161&mode=threaded&pid=48222
Yes, there are links between the brotherhood and Iskcon [Hare Krishnas] and must have been made at least when Iskcon was established in Laguna Beach. How could any ashram in Laguna at the time, in 1969, have not had members who involved in the brotherhood who were established there? Bhakta dasa in his memoirs of his time in Laguna Beach and later LA, mentions how he first came across a devotee at Mystic Arts World. This place, a shop cum meditation room and meeting place, was one of the brotherhood’s main centres. Bhakta dasa also mentions how there was a picture above the shop front door of Prabhupada.
Rishabadev das was also linked to them, according to Nori Muster’s Betrayal of the Spirit, where I first found out about Iskcon-brotherhood links. He was involved with the independent latter day member of the brotherhood, Alexander Kulik. Unfortunately by this time the brotherhood had become corrupted as the counter culture in general had, with heavier drugs and violence. This link between Iskcon LA and Laguna Beach with Kulik was exposed in the press in 1977, the year Prabhupada pased on. It was in the LA media. Maybe you can obtain these articles through your library over there in the states. I’ve tried over here but without more money to hire researchers it is not possible.
Of course if the brotherhood became involved with Iskcon management structure covertly at all, any instance of devotee drug smuggling would be a likely candidate to link up with them, as big hash dealers were inevitably involved with them, especially in California. Nori also mentions that Jayatirtha dasa was a member too. He certainly later on espoused the use of psychedelics with Krishna consciousness and called them the same name as the brotherhood, sacraments.
Here's a short synopsis of Nori’s account she had derived from various newspapers and not to mention also her time in Iskcon PR in LA during Rameshvara dasa’s mIskcon-management.
According to her account brotherhood connection is centered around ISKCON'S Laguna Beach temple president Rishabdev das who had been the chief preacher and organiser of the large cash donations donated by the Laguna Beach congregation to the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), of which one large slice of the regular donations was the brotherhoods illegal patronage. Under his temple presidency Laguna Beach became the watering hole of various devotee's private projects where there was an abundance of money.
Nori does not go into detail of what these private projects were but she presents Rishabdev as the brotherhood's link to ISKCON and vice versa. Thus she reveals him as a devotee who recruited various ISKCON individuals who wanted to smuggle for the brotherhood as part of their service to Krishna with the other devotee Dridha-vrata das as the ring leader of this roving band of Krishna hash dealers. On the brotherhood's side, it was Alexander Kulik, who had been the brotherhood member to bring in ISKCON to the brotherhood's pantheon of teachers. Thus he also brought along trade routes for hash oil from Pakistan, not the usual Afghanistan, and this was brought through Islamic customs in hollow plastic typewriter cases to be bottled in baby bottles, each bottle selling for $11,000, making a profit of $10,000 for each one. Private estate was thus bought, expensive customised cars and six figure donations were turned over to the BBT.
The money laundering fronts for some of this money she reveals as the ISKCON restaurant in Laguna Beach called Govindas as well as Prasadam Distribution, Inc (prasadam is the sacred vegetarian food that has been prepared for Krishna and offered on an altar first before being distributed) or PDI. The prasadam PDI sold was bionic bits, a snack food bar, as well as Hawaiian fruit juice. There was also money pumped through various bought and yet faltering companies. But besides this various not so spiritual criminals were used to launder the money too and in 1977 things went wrong as it was doing generally for the brotherhood and its ideal generally. Various Italians were hired to enforce themselves on those embezzling money from the PDI.
Unfortunately what was not known was that these so called criminal debt collectors, like many criminals, also had a deal as grasses for the federal witness program there, and had made a deal to infiltrate on the federal witness program's behalf the PDI. In the shenanigans of these criminals allied with the law, an ‘employee' from PDI and a congregational devotee, Stephen Bovan was shot by two of the Italians outside of a Newport Beach restaurant because he had owed them money they needed for some fronted cocaine they had obtained from other criminals working for the feds for cash. This shooting came to the attention of the local law enforcement officials. Devotees were cleared from murder charges by the help of high and powerful attorneys because two protected and notorious witnesses disappeared before the trial.
The press latched onto this murder and uncovering of drug smuggling by focusing on ISKCON as the main culprit and thus provoked ISKCON's leaders to defend the movement. The temple president Rishabdev was removed, and another from Trinidad who had been serving ISKCON New York, Agni dev das put in his place. ISKCON dissassociated itself away from the smuggling and the murder claiming Rishabdev as introducing novel ideas into ISKCON different from it’s real purpose. Apparently the other devotees involved in the hash oil ring were ousted from the quarters of Laguna Beach temple and they moved outside, but still dressed as devotees and came to the temple’s Sunday feasts.
Rishabdev, whilst still a devotee was later on involved in 1979 with another hash smuggling enterprise along with Kulik, which was also busted and made the press headlines again. Rishabdev although originally seen as implicated in the murder of Bovan, was exonerated finally but he was charged with the brainwashing of Robin George, a young female devotee who had run away from home to live in the temple and was accepted by Rishabdev there. He was later charged for brainwashing when she ran away from the temple and her and her family sued ISKCON for a large slice of it's money. The ISKCON v Robin George case was a big case indeed and went on for years, eventually settling up later for a much lesser amount than the George's had desired. In 1982 Rishabdev was busted for another attempt at ISKCON dealing and spent a year in prison. In prison Nori describes him as planning how he could raise money for ISKCON and how that organizations leaders at the time, it's gurus (who had usurped the guru position by intrigue) could recieve his donations and yet make a show of denying him in public.
Nori mentions various articles in the various presses of America in regards to this Laguna murder and drug bust and a later one in 1979;
1) The Daily Pilot's Krishna's Disavow Link to Newport Beach Slaying. (1977)
2) Los Angeles Times, Hare Krishna Officials Deny Link to Four. (1977)
3) New York Times, California Slaying Case Involves Ex Mafia Figures and Krishnas. (1977)
4) Los Angeles Times, Mystics and Mobsters: Focus on a Curious Alliance. (1977)
5) Orange County, Krishna Hash Bust: Eleven Indicted in Orange County Crackdown. (1979)
6) Los Angeles Times, unspecified by author but just commented on as having similar headlines as the above number 5.
7)The Register, unspecified by author but commented on how it presented the ISKCON brotherhood pipeline as being one of the largest in the history of south California (at the time though?).
There are no doubt other newspaper articles but these are the main ones.
Nori gives the impression that it was through Rishabadev dasa that the brotherhood became involved with Iskcon. But the Rainbow Bridge film reveals an earlier connection, in my opinion, if one can read between the lines of the cryptic counter cultural symbolism in it. This connection between Iskcon and the brotherhood would appear to be right there in 1969, when the devotees established themselves in Laguna Beach. Rainbow Bridge is without a doubt, a film made by individuals well connected to the brotherhood who had a branch in Maui. The brotherhood were into Yogananda as their statement of purposes they had drafted in 1966 clearly reveals.
The gurus of the Yogananda lineage are definitely portrayed in the film, and the Self Realisation Fellowship temple is in the film as well where a bus is seen to break down on it. It is that self same bus which the person travelling on it spies out the devotees street chanting down the street, possibly Laguna Street (I do not know). The film is about psychedelic surfers who live in an occult research centre hosting gigs of which Hendrix is the one here. The brotherhood are surfers. And the only eastern and popular spiritual movement which is revealed in the film besides Yogananda’s is Iskcon. Devotees are filmed chanting in the street, and in a curious piece of film symbolism we see a black African devotee stood with mrdanga looking puzzled whilst the police harass someone who we cannot see, presumably another devotee. Why include this? There are other bits of oblique references to Hare Krishna in the film.
Kathy Etchingman was one of Hendrix’s main lovers. She left Hendrix to marry, Nick Page, who had studied medicine at Cambridge, and after leaving the junior anaesthetic and intensive care post at the hospital, later went to work at the Royal Marsden Hospital. His family had royalty connections and his father was linked to an order of Knights connected to the City guidhalls of Chester. Kathy had met him through her flatmate, Dawn, whose cousin was a flatmate of Nick’s. Nick had been involved with the counterculture in that he had imported from the middle east, where his parents had brought him up, embroidered clothes and various accessories, carpets, silk scarves, jewellery and wall hangings, which he sold to the hip shops of Portobello Road and King’s Road area.
He had links also with Turkish smugglers in Hatay who were dodging the Syrian army roadblocks in 1967. The boutiques he brought his goods to, Hendrix and Brian Jones bought from them too. Kathy after leaving Hendrix for a certain stability with this guy, which didn’t work out in the end, ended up marrying a Roy, who along with Howard Marks and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Ernie Combs and associates, smuggled hash into America by the aid of a particular band’s musical equipment. She finally left him because of the instability this life caused, especially when he was busted and had to flee to Hawaii for protection by the Brotherhood over there, who according to Etchingham in her book about Hendrix and herself, were armed. Kathy herself in her book gives the impression that Jefferies only really fell out with Hendrix over management issues that encroached upon Hendrix’s creativity, and that all the suggestions that Jefferies was more sinister than he actually was, and was somehow involved with Hendrix’s passing were absurd exaggerations of people who like to sensationalize.
Hendrix called the summer of love the summer of acid. He considered the LSD of San Fransisco to be superior to the LSD he had taken in London. He also came later to believe that he had took too much and started to get carried away with feeling he was specially chosen to be able to handle it. He later saw himself as using it as a great escape. Him and Mike Jefferies, his manager had one thing in common and that was their involvement with LSD and thus indirectly with the brotherhood who were its main suppliers.
Jimi with his American Indian roots appreciated the Shamanic experience of LSD. He would have known, like the brotherhood, that an affront to LSD is also indirectly an affront to Shamanism. He said of LSD that it can be used properly or improperly and that one should control it rather than let it take control over ones self in an addictive and greedy mentality. Thus like the brotherhood had other things besides LSD to enhance its effect like yoga, meditation, surfing, nature mysticism and vegetarian diet, Hendrix had his guitar, his music. Hendrix had a lot of LSD experiences. He ultimately seen it as positive but admitted from his own experience that it could also be used in a negative way.
Hendrix loved Hawaii and was into the Rainbow Bridge concept at least in essence. In fact it is said that Mike Jefferies tried to pull Hendrix away from Hawaii back to the tour circus against Hendrix’s desire to stay there with new friends and new community and environment.
According to Melinda Merryweather, who was one of the leading characters in the Rainbow Bridge film, he was happy there. He may have wanted a break from there to eat some meat after eating the vegetarian meals there as the others said, escaping to go downtown to a bar to watch a musician playing he was into. Nevertheless he did at least eat the vegetarian food there for a week with the folks there. He could have got meat earlier if he had wanted to. Some say Hendrix thought the food weird and that he found all the topics discussed there as being hippy waffle and drivel. But Hendrix himself seems to talk in such a ‘hippy drivel’ way that those Hendrix admirers who emphasise Hendrix’s hatred of hippy drivel, are in danger of turning eventually and also accusing Hendrix’s lyrics as hippy waffle too, if they later become known to them that is. Case rested.
According to some, Hendrix had said that he wanted to retire to Hawaii. Critics may criticise the ‘nasal drone’ and ‘cosmic waffle’ in the film, but the fact is that Hendrix believed in very much the same stuff. Hendrix had took with him there, a book called The Book of Urantia which is an alternative Bible that mixed the Bible with a certain kind of UFOlogy. Wein gave Hendrix The Tibetan Book of the Dead a book popular with the brotherhood as well as another book called Secret Places of the Lion: Alien Influences on Earth’s Destiny which was about alien involvement in human civilization, something that Hendrix himself believed in.
And judging by his book Urantia, which he took with him everywhere and told people that he learned a lot from it, we see a kindred Hendrix interest in that reflected in the Rainbow Bridge theme. Jimi is also said to have found Hawaii a kind of cleansing experience where he could take pot and acid without the presence of heroin, which wasn’t around the scene there. And which was promoted by those whose tried to destroy the rock revolution. He needed to get away from heroin, which he had recently started to dabble in, thus he was not a hopeless junkie as some allege.
He was seeing Hawaii as some kind of purifying retreat. Someone there suggested that they fly Devon Wilson over but Hendrix wanted her not to come with the influence she had over him (the song Dolly Dagger is about her) which included the heroin influence, he felt he needed to make a break from her here. This minor heroin dabbling coupled with his trying to break free from his ‘Dolly Dagger’ not to mention the pressures of law suits, touring, management, and the fact that someone was claiming their daughter as Hendrix’s (which he accepted as his).
All this, as well as his feelings of guilt that he should do more for this daughter (even though he felt he wasn’t ready to settle) and sort his relationship out with his father- all this added up to the clouds of depression that would break through this Hawaian sunshine. It was a sunshine he was positively basking in however, but according to others he wasn’t. Mood swings between depression and contentment thus took place here, in this brotherhood Hawai-an paradise. Maybe these swings could account for the conflicting reports that Hendrix was into the Rainbow Bridge theme and those that he wasn’t. Jimi also jokingly told Pat Hartley and Chuck Wein, who are main characters in the film, that the world was in such a state that perhaps all three of them should commit suicide right there and then. Shortly after this his mood changed. Mood swings.
The gig was at an energy point, at the edge of a crater and was free. It was named the Rainbow Bridge Vibratory Color/ Sound Experiment. It was advertised on Lahaina’s main street and was attended by natives, surfers, hippies amongst them even Hare Krishna devotees, not to mention brotherhood members. The audience was also divided into various camps, which corresponded to each’s zodiac sign. The band also did another gig in Honolulu two days after, which some say was a better gig than the one next to the crater but others say that at this Honolulu gig Hendrix appeared distracted. Furthermore Hendrix’s bassist at the time, Billy Cox, said that Hendrix loved the previous gig next to the crater as it was a highly charged energy spot.
After this Honolulu gig Hendrix returned to Maui and the band members returned home. Jimi got to stay back because he had cut his foot on the beach and by deceit he made the cut out to be worse having it bandaged up twenty times than what it should have been for a minor cut. And they took pictures of him thus looking more seriously injured than he in fact was. It worked and Hendrix to his relief took an extended vacation there for a further two weeks. If this is so, he clearly wanted to be there.
Hendrix rented a house there and got into the LSD turbo-charged world of Maui. He wrote an emotive mystical letter to his father there talking about Angels, Gods, Holy spirits, God, eternal light, themes that appear in the frameworks of his last wave of music, which was moving in a more spiritual direction. Here he must have befriended the brotherhood more closely, and one woman in particular there he befriended talking to her about his grandmother and his native American roots amongst the worries about his father and other things. He wrote a long song for this new found female friend who linked with the brotherhood and who was one of the major characters in the film Rainbow Bridge, and called this song Scorpio Woman after her birthsign.
He expressed a desire not to go back to the tour machine and to also change his wildman side, but in the end he had to go back and face it. He thus reluctantly left Hawaii saying goodbye to his new found Scorpio Woman friend and the brotherhood, back to the region of Dolly Dagger. He is said to have thought them the lucky ones as they got to stay, whilst he had to descend into the hell of New York and the tour machine which was grinding him more and more down. He never got to return and retire in Hawaii, he rather returned to Seattle in a box, exactly as he had predicted to some, according to some, when in Maui. He had also mentioned to Scorpio woman how he was going to die soon.
Hendrix’s manager was wrapped up in the money laundering scheme of banking. His respect for brotherhood ideals may have been limited to their offshore banking scams, rather than to their spirituality, of which he may have made a show of interest. Whatever his relationship to Hendrix was, it was to a certain degree unethical. Jeffries was certainly lusty after the Hendrix fortune and benefited greatly from it. Perhaps he was a brotherhood laundering link in the red octopus side of the brotherhood.
Jeffrey had siphoned off Hendrix's money for himself, behind Hendrix's back through Yameta and co, a subsidary of the Bank of New Providence and also with the Chemical Bank, a bank involved with laundering drug money. Another sink for stolen Hendrix Experience money was through the Naussau branch of the Bank of Novia Scotia, with it's dodgy connections with the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) which in turn had dodgy links with international terrorism through Libya, Syria and the PLO, as well as the CIA, the Pentagon and the Vatican. The usual customers in the dodgy banking networks. Jeffrey was also said to have had both mobster and CIA links too, which is not surprising as many in the rock n roll business have to deal with this incursion into the domain of rebellion. In fact old Jeffrey seems to be almost like the brotherhood’s later money launderer Ronald Stark.
Perhaps what Stark was to the brotherhood ideal Jeffrey was to the Hendrix Electric Lady Land and it's ideal and what shady Iskcon mangers were to the Krishna conscious ideal. In this world of shady banking scams there must have been links. It was that self same banking network which the brotherhood were involved in, also the Hendrix machine, and quite possibly Iskcon. The brotherhood were also involved with the shady financial dealings of Bernie Cornfield, who was the popular dodgy banker for various countercultural figure heads.
Ernie Combes, a member of the later brotherhood, is said by Howard Marks to have had a great spacious aprtment on Coconut Grove in Florida, Miami. The Hare Krishna temple of Florida was based on Coconut Grove at one point. In fact Mr Nice mentions how the upper-echelon of cannabis dealers have apartments in Miami and New York. Mark’s mentions meeting a Alan Schwarz through Ernie Coombs. Alan was Ernie's Marijuana wholesaler in New York and when Marks and his wife settled in NY for a while in an apartment, through this Alan they got to meet the cogniscenti of the cool and the hip of NY. John Lennon and Mick Jagger even graced their apartment at one time there as they were living in the same neighborhood- Upper East Side. Marks remembers Alan’s twenty first at a place called Regine's and Bernie Cornfield himself turning up.
The banking schemes of Cornfield were used by Hitchcock, the earlier brotherhood banker and the person who provided Tim Leary a house for his LSD sessions, named Millbrook. Other gliterati who visited Marks and his wife in their plush apartment were Lady Antonia Fraser’s daughter Rebecca, Jane Bonham-Carter, the Guiness sisters Sabrina, Miranda and Anita. It was a scene which also even the Grateful Dead stumbled on into. Thus through Ernie and Alan, he got to the top clique of New York’s cannabis dealing, and here we see John Sinclair of MC5 fame and the White Panthers, along with the Soma friendly and Iskcon friendly Lennon amongst others. Others such as Mick Jagger and also an unconventional banking brain of the brotherhood’s bahamian tax shelter, Cornfield, all hanging in this same upper countercultural clique, which Marks had accessed due to his brotherhood link. It thus seems that Cornfield and the brotherhood were in similar social orbits, even after they had parted ways due to Cornfield’s final bust.
It could well be, in my opinion, that Iskcon’s top notch managers were crossing over into these scenes too, through their brotherhood links. This could well explain the context of certain kinds of Iskcon ‘corruption’. The rest may be due to the systematic destruction of this countercultural sector by the American Intelligence departments, who are not only concerned about laundered money and drugs (in some cases are actually involved with them) but also about loyalty to their system, which the counterculture was obviously not. They infiltrate and destroy anything they see as a threat to their powerful and wealthy cliqsters, including Iskcon and the psychedelic movement, which may well share more in common than one would think. The psychedelic revolution needs non pychotropic means to attain enlightenment as a safety net to support the psychedelic revolution it would seem.
Iskcon could thus have, due to its involvement with the brotherhood, gained big American bully enemies. The John Birch society had apparently burned down Mystic Arts world, the brotherhoods centre in Laguna. Perhaps similar forces to these wrecked havoc in Iskcon, especially after Prabhupada had left. If the brotherhood entered Iskcon so would have the brotherhood’s enemies. The abuse of gurukula kids seems to be purposely against the mission of Prabhupada’s ideal of gurukula, and it seems possible it was conducted to f--k up the first generation of Hare Krishna’s and make them less effective. Iskcon simultaneously saw the culling of its man power in various ways and now what is left of a once vibrant movement, which has had to flee from mainland America to eastern Europe and Russia, where similar dodgy things will happen.
Thus, Iskcon, another slice of the counterculture sliced and diced by the forces of good old American law and order? No more massive ecstatic street chanting on a large scale going on anymore. Iskcon’s branch of the Chaitanya’s mission thwarted in other words and its first generation of kids fucked up. Thanks whoever you are. Prabhupada was right in other words, there are demons and they are against Krishna conciousness, in fact against any consciousness for that matter whether psychedelic, hip, beat or what ever.
They don’t want spiritual loving sex and celibacy, drugs and sweet rock and roll of peace and love, they want violent sex, heavy drugs and dumbed down rock n roll so they can control those who rebel against them. Of course the big question is who are they? Even if we cant pin them down for sure, for they are well hid, we can see their results and what it is they are against, and thus what they are into which is certainly not psychedelic revolution, love power and Krishna consciousness and the sacraments which are even used as such in the Bible.
They would have been against Iskcon and against the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Another view is that they created Iskcon and the brotherhood in the first place, which I feel is an over excessive conspiracy theory directing away from the real conspiracy as many conspiracy theories are.
Yes, there are links between the brotherhood and Iskcon [Hare Krishnas] and must have been made at least when Iskcon was established in Laguna Beach. How could any ashram in Laguna at the time, in 1969, have not had members who involved in the brotherhood who were established there? Bhakta dasa in his memoirs of his time in Laguna Beach and later LA, mentions how he first came across a devotee at Mystic Arts World. This place, a shop cum meditation room and meeting place, was one of the brotherhood’s main centres. Bhakta dasa also mentions how there was a picture above the shop front door of Prabhupada.
Rishabadev das was also linked to them, according to Nori Muster’s Betrayal of the Spirit, where I first found out about Iskcon-brotherhood links. He was involved with the independent latter day member of the brotherhood, Alexander Kulik. Unfortunately by this time the brotherhood had become corrupted as the counter culture in general had, with heavier drugs and violence. This link between Iskcon LA and Laguna Beach with Kulik was exposed in the press in 1977, the year Prabhupada pased on. It was in the LA media. Maybe you can obtain these articles through your library over there in the states. I’ve tried over here but without more money to hire researchers it is not possible.
Of course if the brotherhood became involved with Iskcon management structure covertly at all, any instance of devotee drug smuggling would be a likely candidate to link up with them, as big hash dealers were inevitably involved with them, especially in California. Nori also mentions that Jayatirtha dasa was a member too. He certainly later on espoused the use of psychedelics with Krishna consciousness and called them the same name as the brotherhood, sacraments.
Here's a short synopsis of Nori’s account she had derived from various newspapers and not to mention also her time in Iskcon PR in LA during Rameshvara dasa’s mIskcon-management.
According to her account brotherhood connection is centered around ISKCON'S Laguna Beach temple president Rishabdev das who had been the chief preacher and organiser of the large cash donations donated by the Laguna Beach congregation to the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), of which one large slice of the regular donations was the brotherhoods illegal patronage. Under his temple presidency Laguna Beach became the watering hole of various devotee's private projects where there was an abundance of money.
Nori does not go into detail of what these private projects were but she presents Rishabdev as the brotherhood's link to ISKCON and vice versa. Thus she reveals him as a devotee who recruited various ISKCON individuals who wanted to smuggle for the brotherhood as part of their service to Krishna with the other devotee Dridha-vrata das as the ring leader of this roving band of Krishna hash dealers. On the brotherhood's side, it was Alexander Kulik, who had been the brotherhood member to bring in ISKCON to the brotherhood's pantheon of teachers. Thus he also brought along trade routes for hash oil from Pakistan, not the usual Afghanistan, and this was brought through Islamic customs in hollow plastic typewriter cases to be bottled in baby bottles, each bottle selling for $11,000, making a profit of $10,000 for each one. Private estate was thus bought, expensive customised cars and six figure donations were turned over to the BBT.
The money laundering fronts for some of this money she reveals as the ISKCON restaurant in Laguna Beach called Govindas as well as Prasadam Distribution, Inc (prasadam is the sacred vegetarian food that has been prepared for Krishna and offered on an altar first before being distributed) or PDI. The prasadam PDI sold was bionic bits, a snack food bar, as well as Hawaiian fruit juice. There was also money pumped through various bought and yet faltering companies. But besides this various not so spiritual criminals were used to launder the money too and in 1977 things went wrong as it was doing generally for the brotherhood and its ideal generally. Various Italians were hired to enforce themselves on those embezzling money from the PDI.
Unfortunately what was not known was that these so called criminal debt collectors, like many criminals, also had a deal as grasses for the federal witness program there, and had made a deal to infiltrate on the federal witness program's behalf the PDI. In the shenanigans of these criminals allied with the law, an ‘employee' from PDI and a congregational devotee, Stephen Bovan was shot by two of the Italians outside of a Newport Beach restaurant because he had owed them money they needed for some fronted cocaine they had obtained from other criminals working for the feds for cash. This shooting came to the attention of the local law enforcement officials. Devotees were cleared from murder charges by the help of high and powerful attorneys because two protected and notorious witnesses disappeared before the trial.
The press latched onto this murder and uncovering of drug smuggling by focusing on ISKCON as the main culprit and thus provoked ISKCON's leaders to defend the movement. The temple president Rishabdev was removed, and another from Trinidad who had been serving ISKCON New York, Agni dev das put in his place. ISKCON dissassociated itself away from the smuggling and the murder claiming Rishabdev as introducing novel ideas into ISKCON different from it’s real purpose. Apparently the other devotees involved in the hash oil ring were ousted from the quarters of Laguna Beach temple and they moved outside, but still dressed as devotees and came to the temple’s Sunday feasts.
Rishabdev, whilst still a devotee was later on involved in 1979 with another hash smuggling enterprise along with Kulik, which was also busted and made the press headlines again. Rishabdev although originally seen as implicated in the murder of Bovan, was exonerated finally but he was charged with the brainwashing of Robin George, a young female devotee who had run away from home to live in the temple and was accepted by Rishabdev there. He was later charged for brainwashing when she ran away from the temple and her and her family sued ISKCON for a large slice of it's money. The ISKCON v Robin George case was a big case indeed and went on for years, eventually settling up later for a much lesser amount than the George's had desired. In 1982 Rishabdev was busted for another attempt at ISKCON dealing and spent a year in prison. In prison Nori describes him as planning how he could raise money for ISKCON and how that organizations leaders at the time, it's gurus (who had usurped the guru position by intrigue) could recieve his donations and yet make a show of denying him in public.
Nori mentions various articles in the various presses of America in regards to this Laguna murder and drug bust and a later one in 1979;
1) The Daily Pilot's Krishna's Disavow Link to Newport Beach Slaying. (1977)
2) Los Angeles Times, Hare Krishna Officials Deny Link to Four. (1977)
3) New York Times, California Slaying Case Involves Ex Mafia Figures and Krishnas. (1977)
4) Los Angeles Times, Mystics and Mobsters: Focus on a Curious Alliance. (1977)
5) Orange County, Krishna Hash Bust: Eleven Indicted in Orange County Crackdown. (1979)
6) Los Angeles Times, unspecified by author but just commented on as having similar headlines as the above number 5.
7)The Register, unspecified by author but commented on how it presented the ISKCON brotherhood pipeline as being one of the largest in the history of south California (at the time though?).
There are no doubt other newspaper articles but these are the main ones.
Nori gives the impression that it was through Rishabadev dasa that the brotherhood became involved with Iskcon. But the Rainbow Bridge film reveals an earlier connection, in my opinion, if one can read between the lines of the cryptic counter cultural symbolism in it. This connection between Iskcon and the brotherhood would appear to be right there in 1969, when the devotees established themselves in Laguna Beach. Rainbow Bridge is without a doubt, a film made by individuals well connected to the brotherhood who had a branch in Maui. The brotherhood were into Yogananda as their statement of purposes they had drafted in 1966 clearly reveals.
The gurus of the Yogananda lineage are definitely portrayed in the film, and the Self Realisation Fellowship temple is in the film as well where a bus is seen to break down on it. It is that self same bus which the person travelling on it spies out the devotees street chanting down the street, possibly Laguna Street (I do not know). The film is about psychedelic surfers who live in an occult research centre hosting gigs of which Hendrix is the one here. The brotherhood are surfers. And the only eastern and popular spiritual movement which is revealed in the film besides Yogananda’s is Iskcon. Devotees are filmed chanting in the street, and in a curious piece of film symbolism we see a black African devotee stood with mrdanga looking puzzled whilst the police harass someone who we cannot see, presumably another devotee. Why include this? There are other bits of oblique references to Hare Krishna in the film.
Kathy Etchingman was one of Hendrix’s main lovers. She left Hendrix to marry, Nick Page, who had studied medicine at Cambridge, and after leaving the junior anaesthetic and intensive care post at the hospital, later went to work at the Royal Marsden Hospital. His family had royalty connections and his father was linked to an order of Knights connected to the City guidhalls of Chester. Kathy had met him through her flatmate, Dawn, whose cousin was a flatmate of Nick’s. Nick had been involved with the counterculture in that he had imported from the middle east, where his parents had brought him up, embroidered clothes and various accessories, carpets, silk scarves, jewellery and wall hangings, which he sold to the hip shops of Portobello Road and King’s Road area.
He had links also with Turkish smugglers in Hatay who were dodging the Syrian army roadblocks in 1967. The boutiques he brought his goods to, Hendrix and Brian Jones bought from them too. Kathy after leaving Hendrix for a certain stability with this guy, which didn’t work out in the end, ended up marrying a Roy, who along with Howard Marks and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Ernie Combs and associates, smuggled hash into America by the aid of a particular band’s musical equipment. She finally left him because of the instability this life caused, especially when he was busted and had to flee to Hawaii for protection by the Brotherhood over there, who according to Etchingham in her book about Hendrix and herself, were armed. Kathy herself in her book gives the impression that Jefferies only really fell out with Hendrix over management issues that encroached upon Hendrix’s creativity, and that all the suggestions that Jefferies was more sinister than he actually was, and was somehow involved with Hendrix’s passing were absurd exaggerations of people who like to sensationalize.
Hendrix called the summer of love the summer of acid. He considered the LSD of San Fransisco to be superior to the LSD he had taken in London. He also came later to believe that he had took too much and started to get carried away with feeling he was specially chosen to be able to handle it. He later saw himself as using it as a great escape. Him and Mike Jefferies, his manager had one thing in common and that was their involvement with LSD and thus indirectly with the brotherhood who were its main suppliers.
Jimi with his American Indian roots appreciated the Shamanic experience of LSD. He would have known, like the brotherhood, that an affront to LSD is also indirectly an affront to Shamanism. He said of LSD that it can be used properly or improperly and that one should control it rather than let it take control over ones self in an addictive and greedy mentality. Thus like the brotherhood had other things besides LSD to enhance its effect like yoga, meditation, surfing, nature mysticism and vegetarian diet, Hendrix had his guitar, his music. Hendrix had a lot of LSD experiences. He ultimately seen it as positive but admitted from his own experience that it could also be used in a negative way.
Hendrix loved Hawaii and was into the Rainbow Bridge concept at least in essence. In fact it is said that Mike Jefferies tried to pull Hendrix away from Hawaii back to the tour circus against Hendrix’s desire to stay there with new friends and new community and environment.
According to Melinda Merryweather, who was one of the leading characters in the Rainbow Bridge film, he was happy there. He may have wanted a break from there to eat some meat after eating the vegetarian meals there as the others said, escaping to go downtown to a bar to watch a musician playing he was into. Nevertheless he did at least eat the vegetarian food there for a week with the folks there. He could have got meat earlier if he had wanted to. Some say Hendrix thought the food weird and that he found all the topics discussed there as being hippy waffle and drivel. But Hendrix himself seems to talk in such a ‘hippy drivel’ way that those Hendrix admirers who emphasise Hendrix’s hatred of hippy drivel, are in danger of turning eventually and also accusing Hendrix’s lyrics as hippy waffle too, if they later become known to them that is. Case rested.
According to some, Hendrix had said that he wanted to retire to Hawaii. Critics may criticise the ‘nasal drone’ and ‘cosmic waffle’ in the film, but the fact is that Hendrix believed in very much the same stuff. Hendrix had took with him there, a book called The Book of Urantia which is an alternative Bible that mixed the Bible with a certain kind of UFOlogy. Wein gave Hendrix The Tibetan Book of the Dead a book popular with the brotherhood as well as another book called Secret Places of the Lion: Alien Influences on Earth’s Destiny which was about alien involvement in human civilization, something that Hendrix himself believed in.
And judging by his book Urantia, which he took with him everywhere and told people that he learned a lot from it, we see a kindred Hendrix interest in that reflected in the Rainbow Bridge theme. Jimi is also said to have found Hawaii a kind of cleansing experience where he could take pot and acid without the presence of heroin, which wasn’t around the scene there. And which was promoted by those whose tried to destroy the rock revolution. He needed to get away from heroin, which he had recently started to dabble in, thus he was not a hopeless junkie as some allege.
He was seeing Hawaii as some kind of purifying retreat. Someone there suggested that they fly Devon Wilson over but Hendrix wanted her not to come with the influence she had over him (the song Dolly Dagger is about her) which included the heroin influence, he felt he needed to make a break from her here. This minor heroin dabbling coupled with his trying to break free from his ‘Dolly Dagger’ not to mention the pressures of law suits, touring, management, and the fact that someone was claiming their daughter as Hendrix’s (which he accepted as his).
All this, as well as his feelings of guilt that he should do more for this daughter (even though he felt he wasn’t ready to settle) and sort his relationship out with his father- all this added up to the clouds of depression that would break through this Hawaian sunshine. It was a sunshine he was positively basking in however, but according to others he wasn’t. Mood swings between depression and contentment thus took place here, in this brotherhood Hawai-an paradise. Maybe these swings could account for the conflicting reports that Hendrix was into the Rainbow Bridge theme and those that he wasn’t. Jimi also jokingly told Pat Hartley and Chuck Wein, who are main characters in the film, that the world was in such a state that perhaps all three of them should commit suicide right there and then. Shortly after this his mood changed. Mood swings.
The gig was at an energy point, at the edge of a crater and was free. It was named the Rainbow Bridge Vibratory Color/ Sound Experiment. It was advertised on Lahaina’s main street and was attended by natives, surfers, hippies amongst them even Hare Krishna devotees, not to mention brotherhood members. The audience was also divided into various camps, which corresponded to each’s zodiac sign. The band also did another gig in Honolulu two days after, which some say was a better gig than the one next to the crater but others say that at this Honolulu gig Hendrix appeared distracted. Furthermore Hendrix’s bassist at the time, Billy Cox, said that Hendrix loved the previous gig next to the crater as it was a highly charged energy spot.
After this Honolulu gig Hendrix returned to Maui and the band members returned home. Jimi got to stay back because he had cut his foot on the beach and by deceit he made the cut out to be worse having it bandaged up twenty times than what it should have been for a minor cut. And they took pictures of him thus looking more seriously injured than he in fact was. It worked and Hendrix to his relief took an extended vacation there for a further two weeks. If this is so, he clearly wanted to be there.
Hendrix rented a house there and got into the LSD turbo-charged world of Maui. He wrote an emotive mystical letter to his father there talking about Angels, Gods, Holy spirits, God, eternal light, themes that appear in the frameworks of his last wave of music, which was moving in a more spiritual direction. Here he must have befriended the brotherhood more closely, and one woman in particular there he befriended talking to her about his grandmother and his native American roots amongst the worries about his father and other things. He wrote a long song for this new found female friend who linked with the brotherhood and who was one of the major characters in the film Rainbow Bridge, and called this song Scorpio Woman after her birthsign.
He expressed a desire not to go back to the tour machine and to also change his wildman side, but in the end he had to go back and face it. He thus reluctantly left Hawaii saying goodbye to his new found Scorpio Woman friend and the brotherhood, back to the region of Dolly Dagger. He is said to have thought them the lucky ones as they got to stay, whilst he had to descend into the hell of New York and the tour machine which was grinding him more and more down. He never got to return and retire in Hawaii, he rather returned to Seattle in a box, exactly as he had predicted to some, according to some, when in Maui. He had also mentioned to Scorpio woman how he was going to die soon.
Hendrix’s manager was wrapped up in the money laundering scheme of banking. His respect for brotherhood ideals may have been limited to their offshore banking scams, rather than to their spirituality, of which he may have made a show of interest. Whatever his relationship to Hendrix was, it was to a certain degree unethical. Jeffries was certainly lusty after the Hendrix fortune and benefited greatly from it. Perhaps he was a brotherhood laundering link in the red octopus side of the brotherhood.
Jeffrey had siphoned off Hendrix's money for himself, behind Hendrix's back through Yameta and co, a subsidary of the Bank of New Providence and also with the Chemical Bank, a bank involved with laundering drug money. Another sink for stolen Hendrix Experience money was through the Naussau branch of the Bank of Novia Scotia, with it's dodgy connections with the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) which in turn had dodgy links with international terrorism through Libya, Syria and the PLO, as well as the CIA, the Pentagon and the Vatican. The usual customers in the dodgy banking networks. Jeffrey was also said to have had both mobster and CIA links too, which is not surprising as many in the rock n roll business have to deal with this incursion into the domain of rebellion. In fact old Jeffrey seems to be almost like the brotherhood’s later money launderer Ronald Stark.
Perhaps what Stark was to the brotherhood ideal Jeffrey was to the Hendrix Electric Lady Land and it's ideal and what shady Iskcon mangers were to the Krishna conscious ideal. In this world of shady banking scams there must have been links. It was that self same banking network which the brotherhood were involved in, also the Hendrix machine, and quite possibly Iskcon. The brotherhood were also involved with the shady financial dealings of Bernie Cornfield, who was the popular dodgy banker for various countercultural figure heads.
Ernie Combes, a member of the later brotherhood, is said by Howard Marks to have had a great spacious aprtment on Coconut Grove in Florida, Miami. The Hare Krishna temple of Florida was based on Coconut Grove at one point. In fact Mr Nice mentions how the upper-echelon of cannabis dealers have apartments in Miami and New York. Mark’s mentions meeting a Alan Schwarz through Ernie Coombs. Alan was Ernie's Marijuana wholesaler in New York and when Marks and his wife settled in NY for a while in an apartment, through this Alan they got to meet the cogniscenti of the cool and the hip of NY. John Lennon and Mick Jagger even graced their apartment at one time there as they were living in the same neighborhood- Upper East Side. Marks remembers Alan’s twenty first at a place called Regine's and Bernie Cornfield himself turning up.
The banking schemes of Cornfield were used by Hitchcock, the earlier brotherhood banker and the person who provided Tim Leary a house for his LSD sessions, named Millbrook. Other gliterati who visited Marks and his wife in their plush apartment were Lady Antonia Fraser’s daughter Rebecca, Jane Bonham-Carter, the Guiness sisters Sabrina, Miranda and Anita. It was a scene which also even the Grateful Dead stumbled on into. Thus through Ernie and Alan, he got to the top clique of New York’s cannabis dealing, and here we see John Sinclair of MC5 fame and the White Panthers, along with the Soma friendly and Iskcon friendly Lennon amongst others. Others such as Mick Jagger and also an unconventional banking brain of the brotherhood’s bahamian tax shelter, Cornfield, all hanging in this same upper countercultural clique, which Marks had accessed due to his brotherhood link. It thus seems that Cornfield and the brotherhood were in similar social orbits, even after they had parted ways due to Cornfield’s final bust.
It could well be, in my opinion, that Iskcon’s top notch managers were crossing over into these scenes too, through their brotherhood links. This could well explain the context of certain kinds of Iskcon ‘corruption’. The rest may be due to the systematic destruction of this countercultural sector by the American Intelligence departments, who are not only concerned about laundered money and drugs (in some cases are actually involved with them) but also about loyalty to their system, which the counterculture was obviously not. They infiltrate and destroy anything they see as a threat to their powerful and wealthy cliqsters, including Iskcon and the psychedelic movement, which may well share more in common than one would think. The psychedelic revolution needs non pychotropic means to attain enlightenment as a safety net to support the psychedelic revolution it would seem.
Iskcon could thus have, due to its involvement with the brotherhood, gained big American bully enemies. The John Birch society had apparently burned down Mystic Arts world, the brotherhoods centre in Laguna. Perhaps similar forces to these wrecked havoc in Iskcon, especially after Prabhupada had left. If the brotherhood entered Iskcon so would have the brotherhood’s enemies. The abuse of gurukula kids seems to be purposely against the mission of Prabhupada’s ideal of gurukula, and it seems possible it was conducted to f--k up the first generation of Hare Krishna’s and make them less effective. Iskcon simultaneously saw the culling of its man power in various ways and now what is left of a once vibrant movement, which has had to flee from mainland America to eastern Europe and Russia, where similar dodgy things will happen.
Thus, Iskcon, another slice of the counterculture sliced and diced by the forces of good old American law and order? No more massive ecstatic street chanting on a large scale going on anymore. Iskcon’s branch of the Chaitanya’s mission thwarted in other words and its first generation of kids fucked up. Thanks whoever you are. Prabhupada was right in other words, there are demons and they are against Krishna conciousness, in fact against any consciousness for that matter whether psychedelic, hip, beat or what ever.
They don’t want spiritual loving sex and celibacy, drugs and sweet rock and roll of peace and love, they want violent sex, heavy drugs and dumbed down rock n roll so they can control those who rebel against them. Of course the big question is who are they? Even if we cant pin them down for sure, for they are well hid, we can see their results and what it is they are against, and thus what they are into which is certainly not psychedelic revolution, love power and Krishna consciousness and the sacraments which are even used as such in the Bible.
They would have been against Iskcon and against the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Another view is that they created Iskcon and the brotherhood in the first place, which I feel is an over excessive conspiracy theory directing away from the real conspiracy as many conspiracy theories are.
http://mauifeed.com/maui-news/remembering-rainbow-bridge-extended-mix/
Mauifeed.com Bonus Material:
Stuff that hit the cutting room floor and other items that may be of interest.
“I remember the day Jimi was leaving Maui. He looked at us with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You guys are so lucky. You get to stay,’” reminisces Mauian Les Potts, who spent three July weeks with Hendrix filming Rainbow Bridge, and was involved with the film’s production from its genesis. Shooting culminated with what was dubbed the “Rainbow Bridge Vibratory Color/Sound Experiment,” a storied concert on Baldwin family ranch land in Olinda, on July 30, 1970. Hendrix immediately went on to play at the Waikiki Shell on August 1. It was his last concert on U.S. soil. He died less than two months later.
Throughout the 40 years since his passing, a haze of controversy continues to gray the facts surrounding Hendrix’s September 18, 1970 death. Fueled by conflicting reports from witnesses and medical professionals involved, a slew of publications and TV programs push conspiracy theories that Hendrix’s untimely end was no accidental overdose. Most recently, in the 2009 book Rock Roadie, author James “Tappy” Wright claims that Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffery admitted to him that Hendrix had been killed as part of an insurance scam. Jeffery himself died not long after Hendrix, in a plane crash in ’73, but Wright quotes him as having divulged in ’71 that “Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I’d lose everything.”
In the time leading up to Hendrix’s passing, biographer Charles Shaar Murray [in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-war Rock'N' Roll Revolution (1989)] writes that “(Hendrix) began consulting independent lawyers and accountants with a view to sorting out his tangled finances and freeing himself from Mike Jeffery,” unhappy with Jeffery’s management style, and Hendrix’s own dwindling net-worth, despite international popularity. “During the early part of 1970, Jimi was becoming increasingly distrustful of those around him,” writes Harry Shapiro [in Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (1990, 1995)], who is considered to be the preeminent Hendrix biographer. “(H)e believed that (Jeffery) would kill him rather than release material that (he) didn’t think was commercial enough,” Shapiro adds.
Hendrix’s final days were dark ones. He was having problems with his manager, Michael Jeffery, and, according to biographer Harry Shapiro, “was becoming increasingly distrustful of those around him.” At the same time, Hendrix was changing his sound—with mixed results. “Both his management and his audiences seemed determined that Hendrix should be content with simply repeating his former triumphs,” writes another biographer, Charles Shaar Murray. “Much to Hendrix’s disgust and despair [his] fresh material seemed to be merely tolerated.”
This “fresh material,” while beloved by enthusiasts today, embodied a bold new direction for Hendrix—jazzier, rolling compositions inspired by his camaraderie with Miles Davis as well as his repeat visits to the Hawaiian islands from 1968-’70 (Potts, among others, points to the tune “Pali Gap”). “He planned to release a double album with the working title of First Rays of the New Rising Sun, at the end of [1970],” writes Murray. But with that project left unfinished, “two posthumous albums released in 1971, Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge… both betray their makeshift origins.”
The latter-named release is better known for the movie of the same name, principally filmed on Maui during the summer of 1970. Murray writes that Rainbow Bridge was a project “close to [Jeffery's] heart—an incoherent farrago of dope and mysticism.” (It might be more accurate to say it was close to Jeffery’s pocketbook—Potts says Jeffery personally sunk over $500,000 into it, plus $300,000 to Warner Bros. and $40,000 to the IRS—funds that weren’t recouped until the movie was sold in ’72 to Transvue Pictures Corp.) But the film is closer still to Mauians, especially those who were in it.
Sure, the flick’s incongruous plotline (if one even exists) coupled with misleading marketing (bootlegs and re-releases often try to pass it off as a straight concert film) make it a tough sell to even diehard Hendrix fans. But it remains worthy as a cinematic hippie relic; a portrait of a sect of youth—specifically youth on Maui—from that era, and includes a unique snapshot of one of music’s most revolutionary icons in what would be his final weeks.
***
Never mind the oft hard-to-follow ramblings of rawboned hippie waifs at “The Rainbow Bridge Occult Research Meditation Center” (i.e. Seabury Hall, rented out during the school’s summer vacation, Potts says, for a meager $3,000 for three months), where lead actress Pat Hartley is sent to investigate the experimental outpost of a man she meets in the Mojave Desert. Even the concert footage in Rainbow Bridge is frequently dismissed by Hendrix historians as not particularly memorable.
But sit down and screen the film with someone who was there—as we did with Potts recently, in his Napili home—and not only are the movie’s charms made more evident, but the texture of noteworthy brushstrokes from this portrait of our island’s history come clear.
“Forty years is a long time, and I bet if you talk to any of the other survivors, you’ll get a different story,” says Potts, who adds that most cast members have since passed. “But this is what I remember. At the time, we were just dumb, haole hippies, and back then, we weren’t really socially accepted at all. Our county government was gearing toward the fact that they wanted [Maui] to be a tourist place for rich people.” Pamphlets essentially saying “we don’t want you here, go back where you came from” were handed out to anyone at the airport with “a backpack and long hair,” says Potts.
The Maui News, then not yet our island’s ‘daily,’ announced “to go three weekly” in their August 12 issue and sold for just 10cents per copy.
A May 27, 1970 Maui News editorial titled “Forecast for a Troubled Summer” reflects a similar sentiment. “Young people here on Maui as throughout the state and across the nation will find summer employment hard to come by… [as] recruiters and businesses… have learned to pick and choose while being most selective,” reads the piece. “There might be a measure of satisfaction to be gained from this if the only ones to be hurt and frustrated were the radicals who have spent four years damning the establishment. There might even be some therapeutic value in discovering the world does not revolve around the desires of the young, and that it can be a tough old world to get along in.”
Potts points out that also at this time, hitchhiking became illegal (a law that remained until recent years), to thwart presumably money-less transplants (the term “trustafarians,” or urbandictionary.com for that matter, did not yet exist), and a June 24, 1970 Maui News brief headed “Hitchhiking Signs Needed?” confirms, saying, “(t)he Committee of the Whole of the Maui County Council wants the Administration to erect signs informing the general public that hitchhiking is prohibited in Maui County. The COW made this request after a resolution asking for review of the hitchhiking law was referred it by the Council.”
“That’s why we never had a bus system,” Potts says, of “squeez(ing) people” to use rental cars (and on a somewhat related note, Hendrix–notorious for his reckless driving—destroyed “another brand new sports car on the island of Maui,” in 1968, according to Shapiro).
Potts says he first met Jeffery at Lahaina’s Pioneer Inn, while having breakfast one morning. Potts and a friend were petitioning a potential investor for $10,000 in startup cash to open a surf shop, but things “weren’t really going anywhere.” It was a time when bogus rumors often flew about acts like Led Zeppelin coming to the isle. But when a man who’d earlier introduced himself, to Pott’s disbelief, as Hendrix’s manager interrupted, saying, “Ten grand? I’ll give you ten grand!” the direction of the conversation quickly turned to Jeffery.
Jeffery returned to Lahaina “six to eight months later with Michael Hynson” (who remains a close personal friend of Potts’s), and it was then that Potts learned of—and became involved with—plans to make a movie.
Cast member Melinda Merryweather, in a 1995 interview with Straight Ahead Magazine, says she approached Jeffery on Maui and told him about a guy named Chuck Wein, a protégé of Andy Warhol, who had an idea for a film.
Terrain, a mutual friend of Merryweather and Wein, had connected with Hendrix in Los Angeles because she was “decoding his music… every note (having) a color, and all the colors having different healing abilities attached to them… Jimi was very interested… (and) had told Terrain that he was from another planet located near an astroid belt off Mars. He came to Earth to show it’s people a new energy.”
“Anger he smiles towering shiny metallic purple armour / Queen jealousy, envy waits behind him / Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground / Blue are the life giving waters taking for granted / They quietly understand / Once happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready / But wonder why the fight is on / But they’re all, bold as love… Just ask the Axis
My red is so confident he flashes trophies of war / And ribbons of euphoria / Orange is young, full of daring but very unsteady for the first go ’round / My yellow in this case is no so mellow / In fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me / And all of these emotions of mine keep holding me / From giving my life to a rainbow like you / But I’m a yeah, I’m bold as love…”
- “Bold as Love,” by Jimi Hendrix, from Axis: Bold as Love (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Wein’s vision, Potts says, was forward-looking, a precursor of what we now call reality TV. The concept was to take real-life personalities and subtly script mostly impromptu interactions. “He just took different people that were heavy into their trips, put them together and let the cameras roll,” says Potts of the “very, very loose script.”
A California native, Potts was behind the scenes during filming in So. Cal. in the Spring of 1970 (though he needed to keep off-screen as he was to be in Hawaii shots), and points out the many locations seen early in the film. During the opening sequence, when a group of young people approach actress Hartley with rapid-fire testimony, Potts says, “those are real Jesus freaks.” Later, during a scene where Hartley is hassled by two police officers, Potts quips, “those are real cops—and, frankly, some of the better actors in the movie.” And, in a scene where Hartley imagines marching off to war with a band of young men lead by a barking drill sergeant, “those poor suckers” were really off to Vietnam.
Potts cringes during the movie’s long, opening monologue—a canned voiceover set to a black screen. “This is a little thick, this guy’s rap.”
“Thick” though it may be, it sets up movie’s intended themes—themes that aren’t necessarily upheld in any organized manner.
Opening Monologue
“The film Rainbow Bridge, which you are about to see, was not made from a script nor from fiction. It is a living view of the harsh and sometimes beautiful truth of what tomorrow may bring to human kind. It is the answer to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. It was made from blood and sweat and tears. The trinity that helped propel another war in another time.
Have you heard of the Mystical Population? Have you ever met anyone from this enigmatic section of the land? Do you know their mission? Their destiny? Do you know that the space people have already established regular routes to the U.S. and the makers of this film who are energized with them are already in contact with them, at will?
The world is in the throes of accelerating chaos. The ever growing dysfunction is dehydrating the mind of man and woman. And what are you doing as society disintegrates? Who will pick up the pieces? The burnt out torch to finish the relay to a better, saner world. And what are the new young, the new old doing, as the earth dissolves beneath their feet? Are the new young, the new old, anonymously working on something to postpone the prophecy of Armageddon?
Jimi Hendrix one of the stars of rainbow bridge, reminded us in a song a few days before his death, that the messenger is coming, and the world is not ready for its final event. Or IS now the time?
The new young wish to help make a better world. They don’t want to inherit the pieces. Peace. World peace forever is within reach. The messenger has said so. And the new young, the new old believe. But you are skeptical. Lean back. Be joyfully shocked and enlightened that other eyes and minds are seeking a better way. A way out. An escape from a frozen world into a flexible sphere, where there’s more of singing and laughing than crying and dying. Worlds of ressurection. Worlds of reincarnation.
The new young, the new old know the answer is not drugs nor other hallucinatory concoctions. There is an answer, a solution. Together, we must find it.
Perhaps it can be found in a spiritual form never envisioned by human kind. But, it will not be found in war. When it comes, we will know because the pattern will be wrapped in peace and love.
The new young wish to dedicate their lives to something more constructive than dying on a battlefield, a main street, or in an alley.
Rainbow Bridge offers some of the answers. We pray you will think of others.”
“Chuck Wein wanted to produce a program to relieve mass paranoia against the arrival of extraterrestrials,” says Potts. “[He] was talking about UFOs because he believed that evil power monopolies ran the planet, along with the military industrial complex, and UFOs were powered by electromagnetic energy. If this were to come out, it’d be a bigger revolution than the Industrial Revolution, because electromagnetic energy would replace oil electricity. We went into a lot of detail about that, but most of it was not in the film.”
The opening monologue, meanwhile, croaks, “Have you heard of the Mystical Population? Have you ever met anyone from this enigmatic section of the land? Do you know their mission? Their destiny? Do you know that the space people have already established regular routes to the U.S. and the makers of this film—who are energized with them—are already in contact with them at will?”
Shapiro’s Hendrix biography expands on this: “Wein claims that a group of people meditated for several months and traveled astrally to visit those with sufficient funds to finance the venture. The record books fail to show whether Mo Ostin of [Warner Bros.] received an occult visitation, but he did get a call from Mike Jeffery.”
“At the time, we were having a lot of UFO activity [on Maui] because they were doing Star Wars testing up at the crater,” says Potts.
Even a May 9, 1970 Maui News piece titled “Ghost Lights Over Maui,” by Jeanne Booth Johnson describes a “funny kind of meteor [that] was reported by a whole lot of folks in Honolulu, including government officials, Air Force and FAA personnel. A spokesman for the latter said ‘the object was not like any object missile or satellite’ he’d ever seen… All our islands have mysterious lights seen in odd places… in the sky or on the ground.”
“Of course, this is all theoretical,” admits Potts, “[but] this is what we were talking about at the time. I’m not talking about little green men, I’m thinking more like the book Chariots of the Gods?” he adds, referring to the 1968 book by Erich von Daniken.
Potts has a few key scenes in the movie, including an infamous one where he and others cut open a surfboard to reveal a large bag of smuggled psychoactives—which in reality, Potts says, was chocolate cake mix. Another takes place at Lahaina’s Banyan tree. There, Potts really interviews two young Mauians about a UFO sighting they’d had, where a vessel came out from the valley above Lahainaluna.
Potts says that, in all, they filmed 43 hours of 35mm tape, “ridiculous” by today’s standards and part of the reason they racked-up “$300,000 in lab fees with Warner Bros.” Some of the footage consisted of “a giant cigar with a blue ball around it, right above Lahaina Harbor.” When the footage returned from Warner, he says it was wiped clean, but audio interviews of “people freaking out on Front Street” remained, though those too were lost 20 years ago to TV news reporter John Yoshimura, when Potts provided his insight for a 20-year anniversary Rainbow Bridge story for KHON2. “John, if you’re out there,” Potts says, “I want that tape back.”
None of the UFO themes—which are clearly what resonate with Potts four decades later—are evident until the very end of the film (and even then, they require explanation).
After the famed “Rainbow Ridge” Olinda concert with the Jimi Hendrix Experience (newly reformed, featuring Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell and, replacing Noel Redding on bass, Billy Cox), the final scenes of Rainbow Bridge are of primary cast members (Potts included) romping barefooted through the Haleakala crater to the Holua cabin, where they sit enraptured by Charlotte Blobe, who was “the closest thing we had to an actual UFO contact,” according to Potts. Blobe was the personal secretary to George Adamski, famous for his claims of meeting with Nordic “Space Brothers” (a term also used in Rainbow Bridge). Then, credits roll over shots of a highly-active Kilauea.
A July 30, 1970 Maui News article titled “Who Visits Haleakala—Maui’s Scenic Wonder,” by Selma Cattell, says “People arrive at the Park from every corner of the mainland and every country in the free world… It is even possible to guess the age of the visitor from what he writes [in "Remarks and Comments") for only a member of the "now" generation would write "Cool man!" and "Outa sight, man."
A May 9, 1970 Maui News article titled "Directions for Hiking in Haleakala Crater," each of the three cabins [Kapalaoa, Paliku and Holua (featured in film)] was once “equipped with water, wood-burning cookstove, firewood, kerosene lamps, cooking and eating utensils, triple-tiered bunks, matttresses, mattress covers and blankets (pillows and sheets not included),” and rates were just “$2.00 per night for each adult, and $1.00 per night for each child age 12 or under.”
Today, according to http://www.nps.gov/hale/planyourvisit/wilderness-cabins.htm, “there is a flat fee per night per cabin which accommodates up to 12 people… early reservations (> 3 weeks) $75.00 per night [and] reservations (< 3 weeks $60.00 per night).” And, “(a) $10 service fee per reservation night is charged for any changes to the reservation. Cancellations made more than 3 weeks in advance of reservation date will be refunded less the $10 service fee per night. Changes to reservations within 3 weeks is not permitted and any cancellations are non-refundable.”
“Holua Cabin, the closest cabin, lies at 6,940 feet (2,115 meters) in the shrubland near Koolau Gap, 3.7 miles down the Halemauu Trail or 7.4 miles down Keoneheehee Trail. Visitors staying at Holua can enjoy day hikes into the central Wilderness Area. The landscape around Holua supports a native shrubland which colonized the lava flows. There is also a campground at Holua.”
***
Need a recap? Us too. A chick from the Mainland shows up on Maui and yaks with a bunch of haole hippies (save one Honolulu girl billed as “Hawaiian Susanne” in the credits) who have an array of competing “trips,” and duke it out with feverish pitch in an “Occult Research Meditation Center” otherwise known as Seabury Hall in the summertime. One of the greatest guitarists of all time shows up, speaks but briefly, and plays a concert Upcountry for a few folks who subsequently run up to the top of the mountain and talk to an alien lady. Then there’s an eruption.
So what about Hendrix? Isn’t he the point? Are criticisms of Rainbow Bridge as a misrepresented concert DVD, or Hendrix-centric movie, true? Yes and no. Hendrix’s music is indeed the movie’s audible cornerstone and his concert its visual climax, but Hendrix himself is little to be found other than in a rather voyeuristic interview conducted in Seabury’s rafters and in perhaps the film’s most fascinating scene, where a grinning Jimi assassinates Barron Bingen from a window at the school’s Cooper House, as he gives a speech next to a green American flag.
Potts shares some insider knowledge about that intriguing and (as with everything else) incongruous scene—the only violence in the movie. “That was all Jimi’s idea,” Potts says, as he shows me a framed photo from an old California newspaper (see below), of him standing next to Hendrix. “We were standing there [outside of the Cooper House] and Barron was giving his speech. Then, he just runs up there, grabs that gun—which he must have seen up there at some point—and just did that.” Potts says Hendrix told him, over the course of their time spent on Maui and “having breakfast every morning for three weeks,” that he was under a lot of pressure from the Black Panthers to step to the forefront of the civil rights movement. That, Potts guesses, was likely the root of his motivation for the scene.
It was a rare moment of spotlight-hogging for the famed guitarist; Potts says Hendrix was incredibly shy throughout the shoot. In fact, every time they’d commence shooting, Jimi would “freak out.” Finally, before the attic “interview”—which reveals an obviously drunk but very clever and cool-tongued Hendrix—Jimi, then still refusing to do the scene, talked with Potts, who’d escaped to the furthest reaches of the campus and was listening to recordings from Hendrix’s famous Fillmore East concert from New Years’ Eve 1969. Potts says Jimi questioned why he would listen to that, saying it was “imperfect,” and so Potts replied, “Well, it may be imperfect to you, but it’s genius to me.” They downed a few Miller High Lifes, and Hendrix was sufficiently calmed—and inebriated—to do what fans consider the most important and insightful part of the film.
It may be in Potts’s words to Hendrix that we find the best summation of why Rainbow Bridge—chaotic plotting, crazy hippies and UFOs aside—matters. Because when all is said and done, in art as in life, nothing is faultless and everything is brilliant. – Anu Yagi, MauiTime.
So, Les said that there was a big headline in The Maui News, something about “Hippies Take Over Seabury Hall.” Awesome. Had to have it. I sat for hours scouring Maui News microfilm for the summer of ’70--without the luxury of indeces*, mind you— and the only thing I found pertaining specifically to Rainbow Bridge was this photo and caption.
“PRODUCER–Richard Chase is a producer for a major Hollywood film being quietly shot on Maui. He is a former newspaper reporter from southern California now producing “Rainbow Bridge,” a story revolving around the conflict between the younger and older generations in America today.”
Mauifeed.com Bonus Material:
Stuff that hit the cutting room floor and other items that may be of interest.
“I remember the day Jimi was leaving Maui. He looked at us with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You guys are so lucky. You get to stay,’” reminisces Mauian Les Potts, who spent three July weeks with Hendrix filming Rainbow Bridge, and was involved with the film’s production from its genesis. Shooting culminated with what was dubbed the “Rainbow Bridge Vibratory Color/Sound Experiment,” a storied concert on Baldwin family ranch land in Olinda, on July 30, 1970. Hendrix immediately went on to play at the Waikiki Shell on August 1. It was his last concert on U.S. soil. He died less than two months later.
Throughout the 40 years since his passing, a haze of controversy continues to gray the facts surrounding Hendrix’s September 18, 1970 death. Fueled by conflicting reports from witnesses and medical professionals involved, a slew of publications and TV programs push conspiracy theories that Hendrix’s untimely end was no accidental overdose. Most recently, in the 2009 book Rock Roadie, author James “Tappy” Wright claims that Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffery admitted to him that Hendrix had been killed as part of an insurance scam. Jeffery himself died not long after Hendrix, in a plane crash in ’73, but Wright quotes him as having divulged in ’71 that “Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I’d lose everything.”
In the time leading up to Hendrix’s passing, biographer Charles Shaar Murray [in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-war Rock'N' Roll Revolution (1989)] writes that “(Hendrix) began consulting independent lawyers and accountants with a view to sorting out his tangled finances and freeing himself from Mike Jeffery,” unhappy with Jeffery’s management style, and Hendrix’s own dwindling net-worth, despite international popularity. “During the early part of 1970, Jimi was becoming increasingly distrustful of those around him,” writes Harry Shapiro [in Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (1990, 1995)], who is considered to be the preeminent Hendrix biographer. “(H)e believed that (Jeffery) would kill him rather than release material that (he) didn’t think was commercial enough,” Shapiro adds.
Hendrix’s final days were dark ones. He was having problems with his manager, Michael Jeffery, and, according to biographer Harry Shapiro, “was becoming increasingly distrustful of those around him.” At the same time, Hendrix was changing his sound—with mixed results. “Both his management and his audiences seemed determined that Hendrix should be content with simply repeating his former triumphs,” writes another biographer, Charles Shaar Murray. “Much to Hendrix’s disgust and despair [his] fresh material seemed to be merely tolerated.”
This “fresh material,” while beloved by enthusiasts today, embodied a bold new direction for Hendrix—jazzier, rolling compositions inspired by his camaraderie with Miles Davis as well as his repeat visits to the Hawaiian islands from 1968-’70 (Potts, among others, points to the tune “Pali Gap”). “He planned to release a double album with the working title of First Rays of the New Rising Sun, at the end of [1970],” writes Murray. But with that project left unfinished, “two posthumous albums released in 1971, Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge… both betray their makeshift origins.”
The latter-named release is better known for the movie of the same name, principally filmed on Maui during the summer of 1970. Murray writes that Rainbow Bridge was a project “close to [Jeffery's] heart—an incoherent farrago of dope and mysticism.” (It might be more accurate to say it was close to Jeffery’s pocketbook—Potts says Jeffery personally sunk over $500,000 into it, plus $300,000 to Warner Bros. and $40,000 to the IRS—funds that weren’t recouped until the movie was sold in ’72 to Transvue Pictures Corp.) But the film is closer still to Mauians, especially those who were in it.
Sure, the flick’s incongruous plotline (if one even exists) coupled with misleading marketing (bootlegs and re-releases often try to pass it off as a straight concert film) make it a tough sell to even diehard Hendrix fans. But it remains worthy as a cinematic hippie relic; a portrait of a sect of youth—specifically youth on Maui—from that era, and includes a unique snapshot of one of music’s most revolutionary icons in what would be his final weeks.
***
Never mind the oft hard-to-follow ramblings of rawboned hippie waifs at “The Rainbow Bridge Occult Research Meditation Center” (i.e. Seabury Hall, rented out during the school’s summer vacation, Potts says, for a meager $3,000 for three months), where lead actress Pat Hartley is sent to investigate the experimental outpost of a man she meets in the Mojave Desert. Even the concert footage in Rainbow Bridge is frequently dismissed by Hendrix historians as not particularly memorable.
But sit down and screen the film with someone who was there—as we did with Potts recently, in his Napili home—and not only are the movie’s charms made more evident, but the texture of noteworthy brushstrokes from this portrait of our island’s history come clear.
“Forty years is a long time, and I bet if you talk to any of the other survivors, you’ll get a different story,” says Potts, who adds that most cast members have since passed. “But this is what I remember. At the time, we were just dumb, haole hippies, and back then, we weren’t really socially accepted at all. Our county government was gearing toward the fact that they wanted [Maui] to be a tourist place for rich people.” Pamphlets essentially saying “we don’t want you here, go back where you came from” were handed out to anyone at the airport with “a backpack and long hair,” says Potts.
The Maui News, then not yet our island’s ‘daily,’ announced “to go three weekly” in their August 12 issue and sold for just 10cents per copy.
A May 27, 1970 Maui News editorial titled “Forecast for a Troubled Summer” reflects a similar sentiment. “Young people here on Maui as throughout the state and across the nation will find summer employment hard to come by… [as] recruiters and businesses… have learned to pick and choose while being most selective,” reads the piece. “There might be a measure of satisfaction to be gained from this if the only ones to be hurt and frustrated were the radicals who have spent four years damning the establishment. There might even be some therapeutic value in discovering the world does not revolve around the desires of the young, and that it can be a tough old world to get along in.”
Potts points out that also at this time, hitchhiking became illegal (a law that remained until recent years), to thwart presumably money-less transplants (the term “trustafarians,” or urbandictionary.com for that matter, did not yet exist), and a June 24, 1970 Maui News brief headed “Hitchhiking Signs Needed?” confirms, saying, “(t)he Committee of the Whole of the Maui County Council wants the Administration to erect signs informing the general public that hitchhiking is prohibited in Maui County. The COW made this request after a resolution asking for review of the hitchhiking law was referred it by the Council.”
“That’s why we never had a bus system,” Potts says, of “squeez(ing) people” to use rental cars (and on a somewhat related note, Hendrix–notorious for his reckless driving—destroyed “another brand new sports car on the island of Maui,” in 1968, according to Shapiro).
Potts says he first met Jeffery at Lahaina’s Pioneer Inn, while having breakfast one morning. Potts and a friend were petitioning a potential investor for $10,000 in startup cash to open a surf shop, but things “weren’t really going anywhere.” It was a time when bogus rumors often flew about acts like Led Zeppelin coming to the isle. But when a man who’d earlier introduced himself, to Pott’s disbelief, as Hendrix’s manager interrupted, saying, “Ten grand? I’ll give you ten grand!” the direction of the conversation quickly turned to Jeffery.
Jeffery returned to Lahaina “six to eight months later with Michael Hynson” (who remains a close personal friend of Potts’s), and it was then that Potts learned of—and became involved with—plans to make a movie.
Cast member Melinda Merryweather, in a 1995 interview with Straight Ahead Magazine, says she approached Jeffery on Maui and told him about a guy named Chuck Wein, a protégé of Andy Warhol, who had an idea for a film.
Terrain, a mutual friend of Merryweather and Wein, had connected with Hendrix in Los Angeles because she was “decoding his music… every note (having) a color, and all the colors having different healing abilities attached to them… Jimi was very interested… (and) had told Terrain that he was from another planet located near an astroid belt off Mars. He came to Earth to show it’s people a new energy.”
“Anger he smiles towering shiny metallic purple armour / Queen jealousy, envy waits behind him / Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground / Blue are the life giving waters taking for granted / They quietly understand / Once happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready / But wonder why the fight is on / But they’re all, bold as love… Just ask the Axis
My red is so confident he flashes trophies of war / And ribbons of euphoria / Orange is young, full of daring but very unsteady for the first go ’round / My yellow in this case is no so mellow / In fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me / And all of these emotions of mine keep holding me / From giving my life to a rainbow like you / But I’m a yeah, I’m bold as love…”
- “Bold as Love,” by Jimi Hendrix, from Axis: Bold as Love (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Wein’s vision, Potts says, was forward-looking, a precursor of what we now call reality TV. The concept was to take real-life personalities and subtly script mostly impromptu interactions. “He just took different people that were heavy into their trips, put them together and let the cameras roll,” says Potts of the “very, very loose script.”
A California native, Potts was behind the scenes during filming in So. Cal. in the Spring of 1970 (though he needed to keep off-screen as he was to be in Hawaii shots), and points out the many locations seen early in the film. During the opening sequence, when a group of young people approach actress Hartley with rapid-fire testimony, Potts says, “those are real Jesus freaks.” Later, during a scene where Hartley is hassled by two police officers, Potts quips, “those are real cops—and, frankly, some of the better actors in the movie.” And, in a scene where Hartley imagines marching off to war with a band of young men lead by a barking drill sergeant, “those poor suckers” were really off to Vietnam.
Potts cringes during the movie’s long, opening monologue—a canned voiceover set to a black screen. “This is a little thick, this guy’s rap.”
“Thick” though it may be, it sets up movie’s intended themes—themes that aren’t necessarily upheld in any organized manner.
Opening Monologue
“The film Rainbow Bridge, which you are about to see, was not made from a script nor from fiction. It is a living view of the harsh and sometimes beautiful truth of what tomorrow may bring to human kind. It is the answer to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. It was made from blood and sweat and tears. The trinity that helped propel another war in another time.
Have you heard of the Mystical Population? Have you ever met anyone from this enigmatic section of the land? Do you know their mission? Their destiny? Do you know that the space people have already established regular routes to the U.S. and the makers of this film who are energized with them are already in contact with them, at will?
The world is in the throes of accelerating chaos. The ever growing dysfunction is dehydrating the mind of man and woman. And what are you doing as society disintegrates? Who will pick up the pieces? The burnt out torch to finish the relay to a better, saner world. And what are the new young, the new old doing, as the earth dissolves beneath their feet? Are the new young, the new old, anonymously working on something to postpone the prophecy of Armageddon?
Jimi Hendrix one of the stars of rainbow bridge, reminded us in a song a few days before his death, that the messenger is coming, and the world is not ready for its final event. Or IS now the time?
The new young wish to help make a better world. They don’t want to inherit the pieces. Peace. World peace forever is within reach. The messenger has said so. And the new young, the new old believe. But you are skeptical. Lean back. Be joyfully shocked and enlightened that other eyes and minds are seeking a better way. A way out. An escape from a frozen world into a flexible sphere, where there’s more of singing and laughing than crying and dying. Worlds of ressurection. Worlds of reincarnation.
The new young, the new old know the answer is not drugs nor other hallucinatory concoctions. There is an answer, a solution. Together, we must find it.
Perhaps it can be found in a spiritual form never envisioned by human kind. But, it will not be found in war. When it comes, we will know because the pattern will be wrapped in peace and love.
The new young wish to dedicate their lives to something more constructive than dying on a battlefield, a main street, or in an alley.
Rainbow Bridge offers some of the answers. We pray you will think of others.”
“Chuck Wein wanted to produce a program to relieve mass paranoia against the arrival of extraterrestrials,” says Potts. “[He] was talking about UFOs because he believed that evil power monopolies ran the planet, along with the military industrial complex, and UFOs were powered by electromagnetic energy. If this were to come out, it’d be a bigger revolution than the Industrial Revolution, because electromagnetic energy would replace oil electricity. We went into a lot of detail about that, but most of it was not in the film.”
The opening monologue, meanwhile, croaks, “Have you heard of the Mystical Population? Have you ever met anyone from this enigmatic section of the land? Do you know their mission? Their destiny? Do you know that the space people have already established regular routes to the U.S. and the makers of this film—who are energized with them—are already in contact with them at will?”
Shapiro’s Hendrix biography expands on this: “Wein claims that a group of people meditated for several months and traveled astrally to visit those with sufficient funds to finance the venture. The record books fail to show whether Mo Ostin of [Warner Bros.] received an occult visitation, but he did get a call from Mike Jeffery.”
“At the time, we were having a lot of UFO activity [on Maui] because they were doing Star Wars testing up at the crater,” says Potts.
Even a May 9, 1970 Maui News piece titled “Ghost Lights Over Maui,” by Jeanne Booth Johnson describes a “funny kind of meteor [that] was reported by a whole lot of folks in Honolulu, including government officials, Air Force and FAA personnel. A spokesman for the latter said ‘the object was not like any object missile or satellite’ he’d ever seen… All our islands have mysterious lights seen in odd places… in the sky or on the ground.”
“Of course, this is all theoretical,” admits Potts, “[but] this is what we were talking about at the time. I’m not talking about little green men, I’m thinking more like the book Chariots of the Gods?” he adds, referring to the 1968 book by Erich von Daniken.
Potts has a few key scenes in the movie, including an infamous one where he and others cut open a surfboard to reveal a large bag of smuggled psychoactives—which in reality, Potts says, was chocolate cake mix. Another takes place at Lahaina’s Banyan tree. There, Potts really interviews two young Mauians about a UFO sighting they’d had, where a vessel came out from the valley above Lahainaluna.
Potts says that, in all, they filmed 43 hours of 35mm tape, “ridiculous” by today’s standards and part of the reason they racked-up “$300,000 in lab fees with Warner Bros.” Some of the footage consisted of “a giant cigar with a blue ball around it, right above Lahaina Harbor.” When the footage returned from Warner, he says it was wiped clean, but audio interviews of “people freaking out on Front Street” remained, though those too were lost 20 years ago to TV news reporter John Yoshimura, when Potts provided his insight for a 20-year anniversary Rainbow Bridge story for KHON2. “John, if you’re out there,” Potts says, “I want that tape back.”
None of the UFO themes—which are clearly what resonate with Potts four decades later—are evident until the very end of the film (and even then, they require explanation).
After the famed “Rainbow Ridge” Olinda concert with the Jimi Hendrix Experience (newly reformed, featuring Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell and, replacing Noel Redding on bass, Billy Cox), the final scenes of Rainbow Bridge are of primary cast members (Potts included) romping barefooted through the Haleakala crater to the Holua cabin, where they sit enraptured by Charlotte Blobe, who was “the closest thing we had to an actual UFO contact,” according to Potts. Blobe was the personal secretary to George Adamski, famous for his claims of meeting with Nordic “Space Brothers” (a term also used in Rainbow Bridge). Then, credits roll over shots of a highly-active Kilauea.
A July 30, 1970 Maui News article titled “Who Visits Haleakala—Maui’s Scenic Wonder,” by Selma Cattell, says “People arrive at the Park from every corner of the mainland and every country in the free world… It is even possible to guess the age of the visitor from what he writes [in "Remarks and Comments") for only a member of the "now" generation would write "Cool man!" and "Outa sight, man."
A May 9, 1970 Maui News article titled "Directions for Hiking in Haleakala Crater," each of the three cabins [Kapalaoa, Paliku and Holua (featured in film)] was once “equipped with water, wood-burning cookstove, firewood, kerosene lamps, cooking and eating utensils, triple-tiered bunks, matttresses, mattress covers and blankets (pillows and sheets not included),” and rates were just “$2.00 per night for each adult, and $1.00 per night for each child age 12 or under.”
Today, according to http://www.nps.gov/hale/planyourvisit/wilderness-cabins.htm, “there is a flat fee per night per cabin which accommodates up to 12 people… early reservations (> 3 weeks) $75.00 per night [and] reservations (< 3 weeks $60.00 per night).” And, “(a) $10 service fee per reservation night is charged for any changes to the reservation. Cancellations made more than 3 weeks in advance of reservation date will be refunded less the $10 service fee per night. Changes to reservations within 3 weeks is not permitted and any cancellations are non-refundable.”
“Holua Cabin, the closest cabin, lies at 6,940 feet (2,115 meters) in the shrubland near Koolau Gap, 3.7 miles down the Halemauu Trail or 7.4 miles down Keoneheehee Trail. Visitors staying at Holua can enjoy day hikes into the central Wilderness Area. The landscape around Holua supports a native shrubland which colonized the lava flows. There is also a campground at Holua.”
***
Need a recap? Us too. A chick from the Mainland shows up on Maui and yaks with a bunch of haole hippies (save one Honolulu girl billed as “Hawaiian Susanne” in the credits) who have an array of competing “trips,” and duke it out with feverish pitch in an “Occult Research Meditation Center” otherwise known as Seabury Hall in the summertime. One of the greatest guitarists of all time shows up, speaks but briefly, and plays a concert Upcountry for a few folks who subsequently run up to the top of the mountain and talk to an alien lady. Then there’s an eruption.
So what about Hendrix? Isn’t he the point? Are criticisms of Rainbow Bridge as a misrepresented concert DVD, or Hendrix-centric movie, true? Yes and no. Hendrix’s music is indeed the movie’s audible cornerstone and his concert its visual climax, but Hendrix himself is little to be found other than in a rather voyeuristic interview conducted in Seabury’s rafters and in perhaps the film’s most fascinating scene, where a grinning Jimi assassinates Barron Bingen from a window at the school’s Cooper House, as he gives a speech next to a green American flag.
Potts shares some insider knowledge about that intriguing and (as with everything else) incongruous scene—the only violence in the movie. “That was all Jimi’s idea,” Potts says, as he shows me a framed photo from an old California newspaper (see below), of him standing next to Hendrix. “We were standing there [outside of the Cooper House] and Barron was giving his speech. Then, he just runs up there, grabs that gun—which he must have seen up there at some point—and just did that.” Potts says Hendrix told him, over the course of their time spent on Maui and “having breakfast every morning for three weeks,” that he was under a lot of pressure from the Black Panthers to step to the forefront of the civil rights movement. That, Potts guesses, was likely the root of his motivation for the scene.
It was a rare moment of spotlight-hogging for the famed guitarist; Potts says Hendrix was incredibly shy throughout the shoot. In fact, every time they’d commence shooting, Jimi would “freak out.” Finally, before the attic “interview”—which reveals an obviously drunk but very clever and cool-tongued Hendrix—Jimi, then still refusing to do the scene, talked with Potts, who’d escaped to the furthest reaches of the campus and was listening to recordings from Hendrix’s famous Fillmore East concert from New Years’ Eve 1969. Potts says Jimi questioned why he would listen to that, saying it was “imperfect,” and so Potts replied, “Well, it may be imperfect to you, but it’s genius to me.” They downed a few Miller High Lifes, and Hendrix was sufficiently calmed—and inebriated—to do what fans consider the most important and insightful part of the film.
It may be in Potts’s words to Hendrix that we find the best summation of why Rainbow Bridge—chaotic plotting, crazy hippies and UFOs aside—matters. Because when all is said and done, in art as in life, nothing is faultless and everything is brilliant. – Anu Yagi, MauiTime.
So, Les said that there was a big headline in The Maui News, something about “Hippies Take Over Seabury Hall.” Awesome. Had to have it. I sat for hours scouring Maui News microfilm for the summer of ’70--without the luxury of indeces*, mind you— and the only thing I found pertaining specifically to Rainbow Bridge was this photo and caption.
“PRODUCER–Richard Chase is a producer for a major Hollywood film being quietly shot on Maui. He is a former newspaper reporter from southern California now producing “Rainbow Bridge,” a story revolving around the conflict between the younger and older generations in America today.”
Jimi Gets Experienced with the BEL
Jimi's Night in Huntington By Bill Fury-
http://www.surfersjournal.com/journal_entry/jimis-night-huntington
One night we were strolling out to the “T” on the pier for a “doobie” check when we noticed the guitar player out on the pier looking like he was wandering around. We said hello and asked what he was up to, and he told us the Golden Bear owner couldn’t pay him that night so he couldn’t get a motel and he was thinking about sleeping on the sand under the pier. After offering him a toke on our joint, Chuck Mundell suggested he come over to the house and crash there. Now, the guy’s a bit askew, so what choice did he have? He walked with us over to the house and as we showed him Pott’s mattress space on the pantry floor where he could sleep his eyes got big! He was spooked.
He told me, “Bill, I’ve never slept in a white house full of whiteys!” We told him, “Hey, it’s OK. Don’t be paranoid. You’ll be safe.” Thus assuaged, Jimi spent the night on the floor, “Cool though!” he was heard to murmur after one shoebox revealed itself to be full of Acapulco Gold, another of Jalisco jungle weed, and yet another of Nayarit sensimilla. Those were my “prescriptions” as I had endured epilepsy for most of my years. Soon, it was a fatty for pajama time and just before lights out I gave him another and a small packet for his boot. He smiled and said, “Good night, Bill.”
The next morning, “Buckwheat” and Mundell told Jimi to come with them; they had a better place in mind. Jimi had planned to get his check and then Greyhound it back to Seattle, but his karma had changed a few things. “We’re taking you to the stone house; it’s a biker hangout but they’re cool,” they told him as they drove out the two-lane El Toro Road into the mountains. Jimi’s eyes had grown big once more. “They’re starting this new thing out there, a ‘Church of Love,’ and a business selling these new ‘tie-dyed’ things.” That sounded better and Jimi relaxed. Once there, he agreed to hang out in the canyon with the bikers for a bit as they were holding big time. Later that week, some collegian entrepreneurs arrived from San Francisco with boxes of tie-dyed T-shirts. The bikers, by now calling themselves the “Brothers of Love” were planning to stage a “Love-In” at O’Neill Park. People from all over were coming, and they were figuring on selling them each a tie-dyed T-shirt and a purple vial. As it turned out, Jimi and The Watchtower ended up performing together at the love-in. Shortly thereafter, the bikers [sic] ended up further adjusting their name to “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.” While this story was unfolding, Jimi was working on a song called “Foxy Lady,” after which he wrote another called “Purple Haze.” No doubt, he returned to Seattle from his surfer/biker interlude with a slightly different perspective than when he left.
Dig on Bill Fury's story in its entirety in TSJ issue 21.1, available for download in the archives.
http://www.surfersjournal.com/journal_entry/jimis-night-huntington
One night we were strolling out to the “T” on the pier for a “doobie” check when we noticed the guitar player out on the pier looking like he was wandering around. We said hello and asked what he was up to, and he told us the Golden Bear owner couldn’t pay him that night so he couldn’t get a motel and he was thinking about sleeping on the sand under the pier. After offering him a toke on our joint, Chuck Mundell suggested he come over to the house and crash there. Now, the guy’s a bit askew, so what choice did he have? He walked with us over to the house and as we showed him Pott’s mattress space on the pantry floor where he could sleep his eyes got big! He was spooked.
He told me, “Bill, I’ve never slept in a white house full of whiteys!” We told him, “Hey, it’s OK. Don’t be paranoid. You’ll be safe.” Thus assuaged, Jimi spent the night on the floor, “Cool though!” he was heard to murmur after one shoebox revealed itself to be full of Acapulco Gold, another of Jalisco jungle weed, and yet another of Nayarit sensimilla. Those were my “prescriptions” as I had endured epilepsy for most of my years. Soon, it was a fatty for pajama time and just before lights out I gave him another and a small packet for his boot. He smiled and said, “Good night, Bill.”
The next morning, “Buckwheat” and Mundell told Jimi to come with them; they had a better place in mind. Jimi had planned to get his check and then Greyhound it back to Seattle, but his karma had changed a few things. “We’re taking you to the stone house; it’s a biker hangout but they’re cool,” they told him as they drove out the two-lane El Toro Road into the mountains. Jimi’s eyes had grown big once more. “They’re starting this new thing out there, a ‘Church of Love,’ and a business selling these new ‘tie-dyed’ things.” That sounded better and Jimi relaxed. Once there, he agreed to hang out in the canyon with the bikers for a bit as they were holding big time. Later that week, some collegian entrepreneurs arrived from San Francisco with boxes of tie-dyed T-shirts. The bikers, by now calling themselves the “Brothers of Love” were planning to stage a “Love-In” at O’Neill Park. People from all over were coming, and they were figuring on selling them each a tie-dyed T-shirt and a purple vial. As it turned out, Jimi and The Watchtower ended up performing together at the love-in. Shortly thereafter, the bikers [sic] ended up further adjusting their name to “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.” While this story was unfolding, Jimi was working on a song called “Foxy Lady,” after which he wrote another called “Purple Haze.” No doubt, he returned to Seattle from his surfer/biker interlude with a slightly different perspective than when he left.
Dig on Bill Fury's story in its entirety in TSJ issue 21.1, available for download in the archives.
Recollections of a ‘Scorpio Woman’
One La Jollan who will likely be at the D.G. Wills event is well-known community activist Melinda Merryweather, who got to know Hendrix while serving as art director on his posthumously released concert film, “Rainbow Bridge.”
The free concert, filmed July 30, 1970, was held on the slopes of Haleakala, a dormant volcano on the island of Maui. Attended by about 200 locals, surfers, students and hippies, it was Hendrix’s second-to-last U.S. concert performance (his final show was two days later, in Honolulu).
Merryweather can be seen in much of the film, including a scene in which she rides into frame on horseback. “There were no professional actors,” she said. “This is the first reality movie. Nobody had dared do anything like this before.”
Merryweather said she got involved in the project after meeting Hendrix’s manager, Mike Jeffery, on Maui.
“Michael Jeffrey was fascinated by me and my friends because we were into all these new age things — vegetarianism, yoga, surfing, being organic and being green.”
The film’s director, the late Chuck Wein, was a proponent of so-called color-sound healing. “Jimi was interested in writing some music by color, which is something Beethoven did, and he needed someone to interpret that for him,” Merryweather recalled.
A friend of Wein’s from Arizona arrived to transcribe colors into musical notes for some of the songs in the concert. Merryweather took the concept further by having people sit in their astrological sun signs.
“People showed up and said, ‘You guys are absolutely nuts,’” Merryweather recalled, with a laugh. However, she noted, when Hendrix began jamming the transformation of visible light into sound, many in the audience wept.
While filming “Rainbow Bridge,” Merryweather, Hendrix and other cast and crew stayed at Seabury Hall, an Episcopal school in Makawao that was on summer hiatus. While in Hawaii, Merryweather challenged Hendrix to a game of ping-pong, in which they played for the shirts off each other’s backs. Though Merryweather won the American flag T-shirt she so coveted, in hindsight she suspects Hendrix threw the game. Years later, when visiting his father, Al Hendrix, in Seattle, she came upon a ping-pong table in the basement, causing his father to effuse about how his son had been somewhat of a neighborhood tennis table champ.
Following Hendrix’s death, Merryweather continued her career as a model, commercial art director and interior designer, going on to decorate Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland Studio in New York City and Michael Jeffrey’s home in Woodstock. “I was like the psychedelic Martha Stewart,” she quipped.
At her request, Hendrix wrote a song for Merryweather before leaving Maui. Titled “Scorpio Woman,” it appears as an acoustic demo on the posthumously released compilation, “Morning Symphony Ideas.”
“He couldn’t read or write music, so he would play into a little tape recorder … for eight or nine hours … (and then) take that back to the studio and build the song around it,” she said.
Upon her request, the song includes touches of flamenco, as well as some Bach, Beethoven and the blues. Hendrix’s manager mailed the tape to Merryweather after his death.
During the recording, Hendrix can be heard getting up to answer the telephone.
“I played it for Stevie Ray Vaughan and he just broke down and cried because he didn’t realize Jimi (also) had to struggle (with the song-writing process),” Merryweather said.
Though the Hendrix estate wanted professional musicians to finish the song, and the sound of the ringing phone removed, Merryweather insisted it be released unaltered.
“I’m going, ‘God, that’s the whole beauty of it,’” she said. “It’s all just so precious and beautiful and rich.”
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(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
