The Rolling Stones At Oakland Coliseum, November 9, 1969

Featuring Ike & Tina Turner, B.B. King, Terry Reid. With a special appearance by Bill Graham

This is the raw transcript of my handwritten notes from the concert. There are words that should have been strikethroughs, so there might be some redundant adjectives. I was staying for about a month in a hovel, literally a broom closet off the kitchen large enough for my sleeping bag, in the Mission District of San Francisco in what is now called a “gap year” from college. I had left old Bard College (the pre-Botstein era) after my sophomore year in 1969, discharged for academic reasons but able to reapply the following January. The end of second year academic process at Bard was called “Moderation,” and I flunked moderation in every sense of the word.

I stayed up all night writing an “epic poem” about the Stones concert; sleep was impossible, as I had no chaser for the amount of methedrine in my system, and the potent marijuana brought on intermittent visual and audio hallucinations, which you might notice in the text. I was so uncomfortable around other people at that time that I h…