Editor:

I’d like to submit a 600-word piece harking back to the Summer of Love, “What a Time To Be Alive,” recounting an amusing vignette about Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the all-but-forgotten perhaps little-known origin of the Janis tree (a search online yields merely that Janis used to hang out there).

This piece is a condensation of the chapter “What a Time To Be Alive” from an as-yet-unpublished memoir, “Born Homeless: My Life as a Feral Cat,” by Jason Kirkland, who completed the work before his death last year at age 46. He lived as a homeless person in Golden Gate Park for four years post-2010. I am executor of his estate.

All the best,

Martin

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What a Time To Be Alive

When you take a walk around San Francisco and strike up a conversation with anybody sporting ample wrinkles and grey hair, there’s a good chance you will receive a sweet slice of oral history.

In the Panhandle there are two walking paths that converge. One day an older dude was in stride next to me as the paths met. This guy had long white hair, a bushy big-ass mustache, wearing a tie-dye shirt, cargo shorts, and had that old stoner floppy gait. We acknowledged each other and within 10 steps of walking next to me he said,

“Hey kid, wanna hear a story?”

“From you?” I chirped. “F–k yes!”

The restrooms of the Panhandle were in front of us and he said it was there during the Summer of Love in 1967 that he saw Jimi Hendrix with a generator and a giant amplifier rocking out at 9:30 in the morning. Thousands of people camping in the Panhandle were gathered around and guess who was sitting on the amp? None other than Janis Joplin.

When I heard this story that morning, the area was enveloped in a fog as thick as the one that guy told me about from the morning in 1967. You could barely see to the other side of the Panhandle. I’m guessing this is what spurred the guy to tell the tale.

As it goes, Jimi was practicing when out of the fog a resident on Oak Street came to the gathering pissed off and unimpressed that JIMI FREAKING HENDRIX! was totally CRANKING IT! at 9:30 a.m.! This dude had a pinched-up face and an angry wiggle as he walked up to the generator only to shut it off, complaining (whiny tone), “It’s too early.”

Moans of having their mellow harshed rang out amongst the crowd then Janis told everybody to hang tight, that she would fix it. There was a 24-hour Hells Angels bar on Haight Street where she went and fetched two beefy, drunk, scary looking Angels, marching them down to the Panhandle and posting them in front of the generator. They fired it up and Jimi got back to work.

Sure enough Mr. Wiggle Pinch Face re-emerged through the fog and once he saw these monsters guarding the good times, the activity of promptly f—ing off suddenly became his agenda.

I love this city.

It was a 70-year-old lady with long, silver hair who told me about “the Janis tree.” As the story goes, Janis Joplin and her friend were high on LSD bicycling one night when they saw small potted trees that looked cool and Janis thought, Why not steal one? So she did and walked it back to her house near Haight-Ashbury propped on her bike seat. Apparently this heavy-ass ceramic potted tree was getting tiresome to carry along because she is said to have deposited it near Hippie Hill that night.

Morning next, some people thought it looked good there so they took it out of the pot and planted it. City park workers later tried to remove it but in response to a protest by thousands of people who loved Janis and wanted to keep it there, federal gardeners determined it should stay. They had the final say since the tree had been taken from federal property. So there it stayed and there it has grown for over 50 years. The cavities that have grown into the trunk became “take a treasure/leave a treasure” holes where people deposit and/or trade trinkets.

Love you, Janis.

—From “Born Homeless: My Life as a Feral Cat,” by Jason Kirkland.