The Filthiest People Alive

Vice: Do you recall the guy in the park, with the skull headdress?

Dana:

Yeah. I’d blocked that out.

The STP camp was the other important place. But let’s talk about high hippie fashion.

There was so much stray creativity going on with some of those people. I mean a lot of them were your run-of-the-mill grimy street heads…

Describe for our readers, please.

laughs

I don’t remember that. I just remember eating the brown-rice goop they were handing out on a raw cabbage leaf. But you also mentioned Lady Jane?

She was something. The black parasol with candy glued all around the edge.

Rags

Hmm…

Rags

OK.

laughs

OK, what about baskets and holey crotches? This was the no-underwear era. Guys in cutoffs up to here like a pussy grazer. You’d see some dude sitting cross-legged with a guitar in Beach Park singing soulfully with his eyes closed, and his dick and balls would be flopped out on the grass.

STPs would also wear long johns as pants.

The Colorado University frats hated the STPs, I remember that. They’d gotten Daddy to send them to one of the biggest party schools and here the town was filled with creeps, longhairs, and crusty butts!

STP John was stabbed to death during an altercation at a fraternity party

Yep.

Yes, it did. You certainly did.

Well, that’s my question with all this. Was it just us noticing their “style” that made it exist? Or was, say, Wabbit consciously projecting it?

Anyway, we moved on. Marc Bolan. [laughs]

Anyway, before that Boulder was already changing. LA country glam was coming in, for one.

Native Funk & Flash.

1971 was when I suddenly noticed freaks wearing chunky heels and tighter, higher-waisted jackets. Long hair started to get shagged. But it was still a street look. It wasn’t being fey and calling anyone’s bluff the way full-on glam did later. 1971 was also when the ironic t-shirt got going. Maudy’s was selling Ed Roth hot-rod shirts. “Wrap Your Ass in Fiberglass.” The personality tees with Marilyn and James Dean. Old-fashioned company logos. 1930s cartoon characters.

He also wore t-shirts of himself. His own face. Bolan’s very confusing to talk about in these terms.

There weren’t any mountains to romanticize. Nothing very ethereal in Ann Arbor.

I think that’s a little later, maybe ’72. I agree with you about Denver, though. I remember seeing Zeppelin with, I think, you and Greg. And I’m wearing tight Levis with silver lamé cuffs, with a silver lamé jacket. And I had a bleached pompadour. [laughs]

But why would Michigan be so different?

Hmm, I don’t know. I saw sequins years before that, at a Family Dog show in Denver. There were the light-show guys and they’d hide me in the balcony after curfew.

Diogenes Lantern Works. They were from the West Coast and they always had on sparkly stuff, old western shirts with sequined roses.

Ha, wow. OK, we need to get back to the subject of the article.

But how did that happen?

I remember fun and wild dancing.

At Hidden Valley Ranch, maybe?

How about the campsite outside Nederland [a small town up into the Rockies about seven miles outside Boulder].

I didn’t have a fake ID.

There was a lot of fucking around the perimeter of STP parties. Woodsy sex. One of the first guys I ever blew was up there. Rand.

A lot of those guys were pretty hot. [laughs]