From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   “THE REVOLUTION AIN’T TOMORROW. IT’S NOW. YOU DIG?”   
      
   Sam Melville and the Birth of the American Underground   
      
   NEW YORK CITY | AUGUST 1969   
      
   On a drizzly Friday afternoon they drove north out of the city in a battered   
   station wagon, six more shaggy radicals, a baby, and two dogs, heading toward   
   a moment unlike any they had seen. Jimi. Janis. The Who. The Dead. They were   
   like hundreds of    
   thousands of young Americans that season, one part aimless, druggy, and   
   hedonistic, two parts angry, idealistic, and determined to right all the   
   wrongs they saw in 1969 America: racism, repression, police brutality, the war.   
      
   Traffic on the New York State Thruway was slow, but a pipeful of hashish and a   
   few beers left everyone feeling fine. Ten miles from their destination, the   
   car sagged into a traffic jam. One couple got out to walk. The girl, who was   
   twenty-two that day,    
   was Jane Alpert, a petite, bookish honors graduate of Swarthmore College with   
   brunette bangs. She wrote for the Rat Subterranean News, the kind of East   
   Village radical newspaper that published recipes for Molotov cocktails. Later,   
   friends would describe    
   her as “sweet” and “gentle.” As she stepped from the car Alpert lifted   
   a copy of Rat to ward off the raindrops.   
      
   Beside her trudged her thirty-five-year-old lover, Sam Melville, a rangy,   
   broad-chested activist who wore his thinning hair dangling around his   
   shoulders. Melville was a troubled soul, a brooder with a dash of charisma, a   
   man determined to make his mark.    
   Only Jane and a handful of their friends knew how he intended to do it. Only   
   they knew about the dynamite in the refrigerator.   
      
   Slogging through the rain, they didn’t reach the Woodstock festival until   
   almost midnight. Ducking into a large tent, Jane curled up beside a   
   stranger’s air mattress and managed an hour of sleep. She found Melville the   
   next morning wandering through    
   the movement booths, manned by Yippies and Crazies and Black Panthers and many   
   more. After a long day listening to music, she glimpsed him deep in   
   conversation with one of the Crazies, a thirty-something character named   
   George Demmerle, who could usually    
   be found at New York demonstrations in a crash helmet and purple cape. “That   
   George,” Melville said as they left. “He really is crazy. I offered to   
   spell him at the booth, but he said only bona fide Crazies ought to work the   
   official booth.”   
      
   “That’s because he’s old,” Jane said. “He wants to be a   
   twenty-year-old freak.” When Melville dropped his head, Jane realized she   
   had offended him. He and Demmerle were almost the same age.   
      
   The echoes of Jimi Hendrix’s last solo could still be heard at Woodstock on   
   Monday morning when Jane left the East Village apartment she shared with   
   Melville and walked to work. They had been squabbling all summer and had   
   decided to see other people.    
   That night, though, she canceled a date and returned to the apartment to find   
   him glumly sitting on the bed. “I thought you had a date,” he said.   
      
   “I changed my mind.”   
      
   “Why?”   
      
   “Because I’d rather be with you.”   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)