I wrote this article 27 years ago, so to bring the first sentence up to date, “It was 48 years ago…” Egad!

Its purpose was to describe the impact of the Whole Earth Catalog on a number of people, including me, and the birth of west coast publishing in the late ’60s. I ran across it recently and thought it might be of interest in helping people connect some of the dots — especially younger people, who may have heard of the WEC, but don’t understand its significance.

It was 21 years ago, a cold, dark, early December evening when I walked into a semi-vacant storefront in Menlo Park, California. A sign out front said “Whole Earth Truck Store,” but there was no truck, no store, just an army-camouflage VW bus and Stewart and Lois Brand and a ton of books piled around in the back room. I was a dropped-out San Francisco insurance broker turned builder. I was about 10 years older than the inspired and visionary kids who were moving and shaking up America at the time, but I’d got the message and in a few years preceding that evening had latched onto many of the elements that were fueling the cultural, metaphysical and epochal revolution of the times.

I had just built a homestead, then a geodesic dome workshop in Big Sur, was tending a garden, listening to rock & roll, making weekend trips to Haight Ashbury, reading The Owner-Built Home, Organic Gardening & Farming Magazine, The Oracle, The East Village Other, The Dome Cookbook, The Green Revolution, getting food by mail from Walnut Acres, listening to Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, discovering B.B. King, Ali Akbar Khan, Buddhism, Alice Bailey, astronomy, astrology, prisms and Ashley automatics, learning about ferrocement, wind electricity, solar heating … what a time it was!
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Why, there’s a change in the weather, there’s a change in the sea… We had a week of hot weather, and then yesterday afternoon, clouds moved in and the temperature dropped about 25° and we even had a few drops of rain, but not enough to matter. I tell you, if we get some real rain, I’m going to be out dancing in it. A local surfer/fisherman said to me the other day, “Everything I do involves water.”

Work, work… I’m actually out here working seven days a week, or at least every day that I’m not traveling somewhere. I love it all, really — e-mail, blogging, feedback, working on this new book — but I’m looking forward to taking some time off to do other things next year. Fishing, hiking, a trip to some warm water, probably Hawaii; gardening, foraging. One of my goals for the next few years is to greatly increase the amount of food I bring home from fishing, hunting, and foraging. It’s doable, it just takes getting away from the keyboard.

Rock ‘n roll in Mill Valley Sweetwater was a great nightclub in Mill Valley for many years. For example, I walked by it one afternoon maybe 10 years ago, and the chalkboard outside said “Tonight: Pinetop Perkins.” Holy shit! I went, and was he great. 83 years old, immaculate purple suit, lavender tie, sparkling piano, flirting with young women. (Oops, I think I’ve written this before — whatever.) Sweetwater was then closed for a number of years, but now it’s reopened in a larger venue, and is maybe even better than ever. Good food, good stage visibility, good vibes.

Friday night I got a pass from a friend who works there, had a couple of really good sliders, a very dark beer on tap and, along with packed house saw the band Zepparella, a 4-woman band channeling Led Zeppelin; it was a good show.

Confession  I suspect I repeat myself, not too infrequently, these days. Here’s the reason: memory is not infinite. You can’t recall everything you’ve ever done (or written) in the past (unless you’re one of those geniuses portrayed on 60 minutes a few years ago). So as daily experiences, and the years, accumulate, the memory part of your brain has to dump something out to take in the new stuff. Right?

   (I have a feeling I’ve written this before.)

GIMME SHELTER is an email newsletter I send out to about 600 people every few months, mainly to people in the book trade, but to friends as well. Here’s the latest, on Tiny Homes and my relentless road tour:

https://www.shelterpub.com/_gimme/_2012-05-15/gimme_shelter-2012-05-15.html