....it's that time of year again, when Radio Schmeck sends me off someplace to pick up a prestigious AWARD, and this year was no different.....

You'll recall me writing, back in January, about how I bought a new computer on New Year's Eve, to make the second-level quota so Wendy could go with me on the trip. Well, the numbers finally came in and we made it. So this past Sunday at 5:30 AM we bolted, or slithered, out of bed and onto a plane on its way to the Holy Land itself, San Francisco. I hadn't been there since age 14, 1968--and Wendy had never been at all.

The agenda for these things, at the second award level, is as such: you get there on Sunday, you collect your brain cells, you go to the awards dinner, you go to bed. Monday, it's meetings from 9 until 9. Then, Tuesday you're on your own to sample whatever that year's locale has to offer. So we had to pack the entire city into one day, with no car. And, somehow, improbably, we did it--mainly on foot. Ouch.

This involved some serious planning, of course. Just in case I haven't made this abundantly clear heretofore--both of us regard San Francisco in 1966-67 the way most people regard Berlin in the early 1930s. We really weren't particularly interested in tourist traps like Fisherman's Ralph or whatever it is--we wanted to try and pick up some faint echoes off the sidewalks, as it were--just soak up some of whatever made that place and that time so magical.

So before we left, we pulled out a bunch of books about that halcyon Summer Of Gonorrhea or whatever they called it, and started writing down addresses to visit. And, of course, since San Fran happens to be in California--did I forget to mention that?--I also cranked up my national phone listing database and looked up the address of every JACK IN THE BOX--oh, blessed Jack-In-The-Box--within the city limits. This was our Mission Statement for the trip--a THEME TRIP--a symbiosis between LSD (which we would not have any of); and Tacos (which we WOULD.) Say, didn't you do a solo gig at the "Lysergic Taco" in 1962? Right behind Carolyn Hester? No?

Anyway. They put us up at the S.F. Hilton--which is fairly central but not particularly NEAR ANYTHING except other hotels and the ritzy shopping district. So we checked in on Sunday afternoon, and had nothing to do till 7PM--so we sat on the bed and I started plotting our path on the map for Tuesday. It immediately became evident that we needed some JACK IN THE BOX, so I tried to figure out which one would be closest to the hotel. Meanwhile I noticed that one landmark we wished to visit was in a place not particularly convenient to all the other places. Even though it's now a movie theater called the "Regency II", we hoofed to the corner of Sutter and Van Ness to gaze for the first time upon the fabled and historically significant Avalon Ballroom."Ever heard of it?" It is, after all, the site of an extremely important event in music history--April 22, 1966--the night that Grace Slick, singing with the Great Society, gave a listen to the headliners--five snotty young hotshots from NYC--and was so blown away by them that she decided to join the Airplane and change my life forever. All true!

So where were YOU that night?

Anyway, I took a photo of the building, which still looks the same as in the old pictures, and then we walked to the JACK IN THE BOX and the rest is history. It was right around the corner from the hotel, as it turns out--and, serendipitously, directly across the street from a landmark I had completely forgotten to look up--The Curran Theatre. Famous for, among other things, that watershed Lenny Bruce show. I just looked up and there it was. Weird feeling, and one that would repeat itself several times in the next couple of days--something that you've looked at pictures of, all your life, suddenly looming unexpectedly in front of your big ugly face. Kind of like you're walking down the street and suddenly here's the Sphinx. You know?

So I scarfed up my $400K sales award--that's well over 15,000 "Thankyouhaveaniceday"s in one calendar year, Jack--on Sunday night, snored my way through Monday's meetings, and prepared for Tuesday with extreme excitement; shared, luckily, by my bride. Here's what we did:

Got up Tuesday morning, had breakfast, hit the street. Had scribbled down a little itinerary, separating the city into two masses: "1967" and "Other." Figured to stop back at the hotel between the two segments--"1967" first. Took the Geary Street bus to Webster Street and hopped off--in order to be able to walk that last block to Fillmore Street to see THE MOST IMPORTANT THEATER IN THE WORLD--and sure enough, there it was, staring right at us, like some kind of holy vision. It's still open, too, and still running concerts several times a week. In fact, I just recalled that HBO does their half-hour comedy concerts there.

There's a big pedestrian bridge across Geary--which I don't think goes back as far as those Halcyon days of which we speak. But whether it does or not, we crossed it, heading for the corner of Post and Steiner, site of the (no longer on Earth) Winterland. There's a big ugly block of condos there now. I took a picture anyway. I fancy that if the wind is blowing just right you can still hear Garth's intro to Chest Fever being played for the first time in public. What do you think?

Condos or none, this was our first of many experiences on this day where reality crashes up hard against thirty years' worth of erroneous pictures in your head. You know that feeling? I had a pretty good sense of what the Fillmore and its environs looked like, and I was fairly close. But--and I don't know why--I had no idea that Winterland was literally one diagonal block away. I'm looking at the map right now and I still can't believe it. I had a sense of it being quite a distance away. Well, it is now. In some landfill somewhere.

Six blocks South to McAllister Street, and then westward. We had a "Walking Tours" book that says these few blocks of McAllister and Fulton have the best Victorian houses to look at, and so they do. An awful lot of extreme disrepair, though. Really sad. But a lot of them are in the process of being lovingly restored.

We sauntered past the University of S.F., at the top of Fulton Street, on our way towards the park and my most treasured destination--the Jefferson Airplane House, number 2400. It snuck up on me, though. In all the pictures it's a dark brown and black thing, and the new owner has whitewashed the whole place. But it's gorgeous anyway. It was that "Sphinx Effect" again. The park is across the street, and we just sat on a bench gaping at the place. Then we walked around the block and into the park.

We hadn't allocated any time for the park--which, allegedly, takes the better part of a day in and of itself. But we were on our way to the Haight and so we cut through the Northeast corner of the park, and then into the Panhandle. What a gorgeous place. And it was actually possible, in the Panhandle, to visualize it being 1967 and waiting for the free concert to start.

Thence to 1090 Page Street, where Big Brother lived and rehearsed both before and during Janis--however, as I expected, it's gone. Two skinny ugly row houses have been planted in its place. So, no Joplin vibe present. No problem. It was neat just looking at the neighborhood.

Back East, to Ashbury, across Haight Street and up the hill to #710--the first and most celebrated Communal Band House in town, where of course the Dead lived and officed. Recognized those front steps right away. Although, as we stood in front of it, the guy who lives there now came home--in his little Yuppie Rover--and hit the automatic garage door opener and drove inside. Kind of skewed the ambience a little bit, yes? I took a picture anyway.

Then, up and down the length of Haight Street. This was fun, but you have to detach yourself from "What It Was" and just enjoy it as a funky little shopping street. It's kind of weird really--you sort of expect there to be at least SOME component of decades-late Deadhead youth roaming the street, but there's none of that at all. A lot of pierced eyebrows though. No tourists either--we were the only ones. And what kind of schmuck do you figure you must feel like while taking a photograph of the Haight/Ashbury street sign in the midst of this teeming roil of Post-Metallica youth? Well, I'm relatively shameless and besides nobody knows who I am anyway. But now, of course, I'm conjuring a vision of myself in September 1999, performing my big hit single on Saturday Night Live (with Steve Katz on harmonica, of course) and some kid is watching it on TV and saying "Hey, yo, Ashley Taylor Samantha Megan--isn't that that a**hole we saw taking the picture of the street sign over on Haight?"

Well, that won't happen, I guess. He won't have enough brain cells left by then to be able to scrape that together. Hope not anyway.

Now we get our first taste of the, uh, VERTICAL nature of the city. I had erroneously supposed that those legendary hills were concentrated mainly on the OTHER side of the city. The map, of course, is flat. Well, our Haight Street path was taking us right past Buena Vista Park, which the Fodor's Guide says has "Spectacular views of the city." And that it does, as it turns out. But in order to access said views you have to go straight up--several hundred feet up, in fact. These are not hills; anywhere else they would be called CLIFFS. Sheer up, sheer down. No Eastern city fathers would even dream of putting roads, homes, and park trails on them. But we walked to the top and it was pretty amazing.

That little detour wore us out, so instead of walking back along Haight to Market Street, we took a bus. We were heading for the corner of Market and Van Ness, the former site of Fillmore West.

I had a good picture in my head, of the Bloomfield album cover that shows the crowd snaked around the corner waiting to get in. It was an unusually shaped building on the corner, with the building's own corner cut off. Well, why am I telling YOU this, you've seen it. But my point is that I figure I'll be able to spot which building on which corner it was, by the shape.

So, of course, there are TWO buildings, catercorner from one another, with that shape. And I think, now, that I took a picture of the wrong one. I chose the one with a larger and more prominent "upstairs". But then I read, on the plane on the way home, that the theater was above a car dealership--and the other building was a car dealership. No matter. We'll just have to go BACK!

[The Editor Speaks, 1999: Idiot. You had the right one all the time. See the marquee?]

We walked along Market back to the hotel, and of course, JACK IN THE BOX.

I spent a fitful half-hour up in the room, trying to revise the itinerary in a way that would let us see everything without too much backtracking or mass transit. We ended up skipping the former site of The Matrix--which I was surprised to find is REALLY FAR AWAY from all the other landmarks that one associates with it. Again, why am I telling you this, you've been there. I really wanted to see it but we'll JUST HAVE TO GO BACK.

We took the cable car all the way North--perilously close to the tourist trap Fisherman's Whack--to stroll down Lombard Street. Our calves and ankles got quite a workout in this neighborhood, as you'd imagine.

Here's an anecdote: you need exact change for the bus. One dollar. We had run out of singles, and we needed to get from Ghirardelli Square to Union Street--only eight blocks but straight up. The bus driver says, "Only to Union Street? C'mon, get on." And rode us there gratis.

Toto, I don't think we're in New York anymore....can you IMAGINE such a thing??

Our next destination was REALLY arcane--a little one-block side road called Russell Street. Number 29, a little bungalow nestled incongruously between the rowhouses, was where Kerouac and Cassady lived in 1952, while revising On The Road and taping conversations that eventually became Visions Of Cody. This all came out of that same Walking Tours book--but obviously the guy that lives there now doesn't know his house's history OR the fact that it's listed on a walking tour--because he was extremely bemused by the sight of me taking a picture of his frontage, as it were. So much so that Wendy insisted we hustle on back up the hill, and kept looking behind her the whole way.

We wanted to visit another tourist trap, Coit Tower (no pun here, too easy) but it's closed on Tuesdays in February on odd-numbered years in which Randy California drowns, or something--so we didn't go there. We bussed over to North Beach to see City Lights Bookstore--of course. Couldn't skip that.

It was just getting dark when we hobbled in. I had been thinking, all day, how teeming this city and its suburbs are with Famous People I'd Like To Run Into, and we of course hadn't run into anyone at all--not even Roy Blumenfeld--and I'm ruminating on this subject as we plod up the stairs, and there at the top--BANG--Ferlinghetti. So there you go. I didn't speak to him--what the f*** do you say to HIM? But at least we saw somebody important. I noticed later on in the Fodor's that you can usually expect to find him there.

We bussed back to the hotel, had dinner at a Mexican place (NOT Jack-In-The-Box) and then decided to wind up by taking the cable car end-to-end in the dark.

Then we came back home.

Wendy says I should keep these Boredom Slabs shorter, but I'm writing them mainly as a sort of Diary That I Let You Look At. Anyway, in the interests of brevity--of which I have none--I'll slice this off here. The story of how they lost our bags AGAIN will have to wait for another time...................