When John Simon made the Haight-Ashbury scene the flower-power generation was just starting to get it together. Simon, then 18, began as an outlaw biker fighting the Hell's Angels, was drawn more and more into the gentler acid-love culture and became one of the leaders of the Diggers.
—back cover, The Sign of the Fool.
He also worked with the Grateful Dead, took part in several legendary hippie events including the "bananadine" hoax, and put up the sign that read,
HAIGHT-ASHBURY CITY LIMITS
Pop. Subject to change
Elev. Out of Sight.
Then he wrote a memoir, published by Ace Books in 1971, that chronicles these things, but also gleefully recounts some of the darker sides of the counterculture. And, despite its trippy cover* and promotional emphasis on the Haight, most of the book concerns motorcycles and their uneasy riders.
We begin with young John "Spyder" Simon unchaining his chopper in "San Francisco's North Beach, late at night, on one of those foggy, damp November days" (1). In no time he and his buddy, Motorcycle Richie, are fleeing the fuzz, fixing a damaged bike, and smoking weed with a drug-cooking friend. Spyder left home at 17, and managed by 18 to find a job as a lineman for the telephone company, working in and near the Haight. It's 1965; something is in the air.
But time and pages will pass before our man finds himself among the hippies. He and Richie form a biker club, and we're treated to an inside look at some guys who maintain and ride bikes in the mid-60s and think helmets are a "sissy trip." Spyder figures that when his "number is up," he'd go whether he "had a helmet or not"(26). They drink a good deal, do various drugs (though our narrator is slow to come to LSD), and listen to the local music scene, which includes Janis Joplin. For their own protection (people riding Harleys were targeted both by the authorities and other organized motorcycle clubs), they form their own gang, the Gladiators. In addition to a growing membership, they "acquired a very important piece of real estate", their very own mamma, "considered club property" and "treated as such" (48). He then describes what he means in detail. That attitude won't improve much after Spyder becomes a hippie and a Digger.
And that won't happen until we're more than halfway through the book.
Long before we arrive at a pad in the mythologized Haight, we're already seeing the forces that would make the psychedelic dream so short-lived. The arrival of hard drugs have been blamed for ruining hippiedom and that's at least partially true, but they weren't latecomers to the scene, as popular history insists. From the start, a segment of the counterculture population was using far more dangerous things than marijuana and still-legal LSD. Of course, the choice of drugs also speaks to the particular crowd Simon knew.
It's really only in the last third that we get the specific kind of counterculture memoir advertised on the cover. Spyder and Richie never really change their essential nature when they become Diggers. Yes, to their credit, they acquire and distribute food, learn to bake bread in a church and teach others how to do the same, and they help set up crash pads for runaways. They also pressure "two teenybopper chicks, whose combined ages maybe added up to thirty-three"(142) for sexual favours in return for drugs and accommodations, and our narrator seems pretty proud of the fact.
Our story ends with Spyder attending the 1967 March on the Pentagon, returning to San Francisco to work at the Carousel Ballroom, and having a tarot reading, in which our man draws the Fool.
This book maintains a narrative flow, but it's not especially well-written. Spyder never met a cliché he didn't like, and he can be a serious asshole. So why read it?
The closest we can come to understanding the past, even the recent past, is through the unabashed accounts of people who lived it. It's also helpful to peek into the minds of people who don't think as you do. I taught both creative writing and history. I kept such books in my classroom as optional resources. Like many educators, I recommended that students go to available archival and contemporaneous accounts, if they were researching an historical event or writing about being young and dealing with the ISSUES of such-and-such a supposedly more exciting decade. You don't ignore such sources because they confuse and offend you. Those are reasons to read them.
Perhaps the best review of The Sign of the Fool was provided before the book ever saw print, by the man at Ace who acquired it for publication:
I've been buying some Yout' type books, too, beginning with one called The Sign of the Fool which is a set of reminiscences of life in the Hashbury 1965-68 by'a kid who went there as a biker and gradually drifted into the acid culture instead. It's badly written and I left a lot of the clumsiness of style in the manuscript when I did the editing, because it sounds more real this way: I could've cleaned everything up so tidily that it would've read like an as-told-to book', but that would really have ruined it.
—Terry Carr, Gilgamesh newsletter #38, February 15, 1971, 1-2.
John "Spyder" Simon died September 2, 2014 in Anchorage, Alaska, survived by his second (?) wife, two children, and five grandchildren. The Sign of the Fool, never reprinted, was his only published book.
*Psychedelic patterns, a woman's buttocks, a Fool card, and a face, possibly of the author himself, looking decidedly creepy.