Coyote Saw Crosby Stills, Nash & Young Concert Before Woodstock
Coyote’s novel, Sid's Place, is the tale of a San Diego drug runner in 1969, and sheds dark shadows on Woodstock.
What were the FLOWER POWER YEARS really like? The Hippy Coyote knows. Drafted in the 1970s, completed in 1984, Coyote's novel, SID'S PLACE, is a story of his life before he was deported to Newfoundland in 1970 for a drug trafficking conviction.
President Richard Nixon had declared war on hippies, yippies, drugs, and political activism. Unless you were around in 1969, you couldn't understand the paranoia and hatred that existed between teens and college students, towards every American over the age of 30. There was a civil war, the WAR ON DRUGS. Who were the enemy soldiers of this war? American students. America was AT WAR with its youth.
As a result of this DRUG WAR in America, dealers had to respond with this aggression, with aggression. Cops killed kids, they were the enemies back then.
Coyote's book, SID'S PLACE, is a slice of life from this turbulent era. As women discovered birth control, war protestors were exiled and jailed, and Coyote's friends were sent to Vietnam for execution; Coyote meanders through this quagmire of social unrest as the fictional character, TOM CALDER, a fugitive from justice, like Coyote, who interacts with characters that Coyote knew from this period of his life.
"I lived for concerts," pants Coyote excitedly. "I'd panhandle for tickets, outside the concert if I didn't already have a ticket. Once inside, it was a circus sometimes. I got to see some of the finest bands and artists of my lifetime in those years. Unlike today, when everyone is playing it safe, sounding like someone else, or trying to make a hit record--in those days my favorite artists were trying to be more than different, they were trying to be THE BEST, and many wanted to improve the world. That rubbed off on me. Oh yeah, I saw Crosby Stills & Nash with The Grateful Dead in San Diego. They announced to the audience, "This is the first time we've performed live together."
Years later, while watching the Woodstock Concert on television, Coyote heard Crosby Stills & Nash say that Woodstock was their second time performing together.
1983, Coyote, then known as Richard O’Connor, sits in his sky blue van writing his novel, SID’S PLACE, as jets fly all around him in the LAX airport parking lot where Richard is employed as a Union carpenter.
Although most people knew that Richard was saving his union wages to launch his record company, Shaolin Records, in 1984 few people knew what Richard was doing during his lunchbreaks that entire year. He was finishing his novel, SID’S PLACE. “I’d make my lunches and wrap them in aluminum foil. By lunchtime, my foil-wrapped lunch would be heated up by the sun on my dashboard. I’d eat quickly and start writing, usually while I was still eating.”
“Unfortunately, when I finished the book, I sent it to dozens of agents and dozens of book publishers and although I received many compliments, only one agent was brave enough to risk, “the wrath of the Reagan Administration.”“
SID’S PLACE has a drug runner as a hero. This was not acceptable to President Ronald Reagan. Big publishers admitted it in writing, they were afraid to publish a “pro drug book.”
The one editor with a strong passion for SID’S PLACE, of Bantam Books, helped Coyote through two drafts of the book--but then got hired to cowrite a serial killer biography, leaving Coyote without an editor. Bantam decided the book was, “too risky,” and Coyote was left holding his completed 2nd draft of the novel, ready for publication.
So, 15 years later, in 1988, with an iMac computer, Quark XPress software, Photoshop, and three weeks before he’s evicted--Coyote edits, typesets, and publishes the book himself under his own imprint, Shaolin Communications, and self-publishes the 3rd Draft of the Sid's Place novel.
The last part of completing the book was to substitute lyrics for the songs that Coyote had imagined and planned in some sections of the book. Bantam was going to pay for the rights to use the lyrics of this song, but this was beyond Coyote's financial abilities. So, Coyote wrote new lyrics, poetry and songs for the book, Sid's Place. This new poetry to replace the songs of the sixties, the soundtrack to this story, are a diverse batch of poems and lyrics that may spawn a soundtrack album also.
