Yes,kids, before there was Woodstock, there was...

Above: yeah, it's me, Ray, in my present state of baba-hood...recording 2003's kick ass studio version of Note: click away, the link to the MP3 is now live again, on MySpace

...and below, the same Ray, spring of '65, callow, snotty, terminally ironic, miserably unhappy—mere months before the first inkling of what was to come.

Lots of water under that bridge.

...with "Sissy," Clover Farm, Applestock, Summer, 1966

Something Tom Wolfe wrote years ago still resonates: no big sprawling novels emerged from the so-called "hippie" experience of the 60's—in particular, the magic year of 1966, when everyone was still beautiful (or at least grooovy) and it actually seemed that history might describe a bright new human pattern.

A few years back , we saw Drop City (T.C. Boyle), in which the new morning of the 60s has given way to the dream-jaded 70's —luridly downbeat, post-Altamont, post-Manson, post-Easy Rider. The end of the affair.

But wasn't Applestock–in its delicious secrecy, its unafflicted innocence–the hallowed matrix where "The Sixties" actually began?

Whaddya think? E-mail me: babaray@applestocknation.com

Okay, I've got my own ideas, but now that I'm myself a character in William McCranor Henderson's barbaric, shambling yawp of a manuscript, Applestock'66 it's all academic. The book is within weeks, days, hours, minutes of being finished (as it has been for years). I'm past caring any longer whether or not it contains frank revelations about me or reveals the weirdly skewed thinking pattern of my youth. I don't even care that 30-odd years later, I find my behavior inconceivable and mortifying.

So effing WHAT??

Folks, here's the reality: Applestock '66 is the only honest treatment we'll ever have of the crypto-legendary Applestock Festival of Rock and Folk. Deaths and freakouts over the years insure that no more eye witness accounts will be written. This revelation dawns when we're only beginning to know how huge a moment "Applestock" was for the planet. How monumental. How ineluctably defining of everthing that followed in its mythic wake.

As for me & my silly pride, I can only kneel before the legend of Applestock and say, even of my part in it..."I'm not worthy. I'm only one man...a Baba, yes, but one man only."

So let the chips fall where they always do. The word I live by now is "whatever." I lost my ego years ago, in the rush of those most vexacious, most luscious 60's... along with my virginity, too, and a large number of brain cells.

Until the book appears, tease your appetite with some little packets of mind candy.

Read an Excerpt

Puruse Ray's blog

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