KRLA – Casey Kasem – September 16, 1967 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Summer is over – life gets back to normal. You spent the summer wandering the streets of San Francisco with your friends from L.A. – you crashed in Berkeley and panhandled for cigarettes. You lost your virginity twice and fell in love every day, all summer long – only not with the same person twice, even if they were only in your mind. The city is jammed with kids – a lot of them look like you. A lot of them are from L.A. You hung out in Golden Gate Park – you did Blotter Acid and smoked the fabled Acapulco Gold (at least that’s what the guy told you who passed the joint back and forth). You got a rash. You got the Crabs. You got the Clap. They start to know you by name at the Free Clinic. You ate nothing but Brown Rice for two weeks. You finally ate at The Spaghetti Factory and Mike’s Pool Hall in North Beach. You managed to sneak into The Fillmore and saw Kaleidoscope and The Chambers Brothers along with Santana. Your shoes fell apart in the rain and you got some at the Diggers Free Store, only they were size 13 and you’re a size 10. You smile a lot. You’re also stoned a lot. But by the end of August you have to get back to L.A. before the semester starts. So you and your friends, along with a few hundred other people, all line the freeway on-ramp and hitch a ride back to L.A. – and a day or so later, stuffed into a Ford Econoline Van with 20 others, you wander down the Grapevine and get your first blast of smoggy air in almost two months. And it all comes back to you. This is where you live – this is your town – nowhere else in the world is there a building that looks like a stack of records in the middle of Hollywood. Only now everything looks a little weird – and the smog is very colorful.
And that’s what you did on your summer vacation in 1967.
And to remind you that you’re back home, there’s KRLA fading in on the radio, it’s September 16, 1967 – a whole half-hour of Casey Kasem. Just like always.
