Memories of Drop City: The first hippie commune of the 1960's and the Summer of Love [Paperback]

John Curl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 27, 2006

Memories of Drop City follows a group of people and their radical movement, in the Southwest and on both coasts, in a decade that shaped the rest of the century.

“John Curl’s characters in Memories of Drop City aspire to be ‘100 years’ ahead of the rest of us, but Curl shows, through his highly crafted and brilliant novelistic memoir, that they often succumb to the same social flaws as the rest of us. This might be the most balanced memoir or novel yet published about the Sixties.”

Ishmael Reed, National Book Award nominee

“With this compelling evocation and portrayal of breathing people, John Curl unpacks the boxed lunch myth of America’s alternative lifestyle Sixties, and restores the day to day flavor of a deeply fabled era still key to understanding the way we live (and don’t live) now.”

Al Young, poet laureate of California

”Memories of Drop City is an extraordinary book which brings the Sixties back to life in vivid detail and conveys the spirit of the Sixties better than almost anything else I’ve read.”

Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe

”Memories of Drop City brings vibrantly to light the flower children who returned to the land seeking peace and by that act were committing revolution. John Curl captures the idealism of a generation and their demonstrations against war in a revolution with a smile..”

Floyd Salas, author of Tattoo the Wicked Cross

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Curl lived in the underground communities that shaped the emerging counterculture in New York, the Bay Area, and the Southwest in the 1960s. Author of eight volumes of poetry, including Scorched Birth and Columbus in the Bay of Pigs, a history of cooperation, Worker Cooperatives or Wage Slavery, and translations of classical Native American poetry, Ancient American Poets, he is a custom woodworker and community activist in Berkeley.

Product Details

• Paperback: 262 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (November 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595423434
• ISBN-13: 978-0595423439
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #918,046 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Curl passed his childhood winters on icy Manhattan streets and summers in steamy New Jersey pine forest farm country. A war baby of World War II, his parents were Irish-Catholic, English-Protestant, and Romanian-Austrian Jew, with one grandfather a Republican, the other a Communist, his parents New Deal Democrats, and on Thanksgiving they all got together and actually had a good time. The astrologers say his chart is a Grand Trine. He lived in a Sixties rural commune in Colorado, worked on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, and has practiced custom woodworking at Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop in Berkeley, CA for over 35 years. He is chairman of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC), promoting arts and industries in the manufacturing zone to the dismay of gentrifying developers, and has served as a Berkeley planning commissioner to the consternation of some elected officials. He is a fixture on the committee organizing the annual Berkeley Indigenous Peoples Day Pow Wow. He has a degree in Comparative Literature from CCNY (CUNY) and is a longtime board member of PEN Oakland and PEN USA.

John Curl's books:

HISTORY: For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (PM Press, 2009); History of Work Cooperation in America, (1980); History of Collectivity in the San Francisco Bay Area, (1982).

"It is indeed inspiring to be reminded by Curl's new book For All The People of the noble history of cooperative work in the United States." Howard Zinn

MEMOIR of the 1960s commune movement: Memories of Drop City: The First Hippie Commune and the Summer of Love (2007).

"With this compelling evocation and portrayal of breathing people in Memories of Drop City, John Curl unpacks the boxed lunch myth of America's alternative lifestyle Sixties, and restores the day to day flavor of a deeply fabled era still key to understanding the way we live (and don't live) now." Al Young.

"Curl's characters in Memories of Drop City aspire to be '100 years' ahead of the rest of us, but he shows, through his highly crafted and brilliant novelistic memoir, that they succumb to the same social flaws as the rest of us. This might be the most balanced memoir or novel yet published about the Sixties." Ishmael Reed


TRANSLATION: Ancient American Poets (2006) reveals the very beginnings of American poetry, through translations of work of three American Indian poets from the 1400s, and biographies of the poets. Included are Flower Songs by Nezahualcoyotl (Nahuatl - Aztec), The Songs of Dzitbalche by Ah Bam (Yucatec Maya), and The Sacred Hymns of the Situa by Pachacuti (Quechua - Inca). A radically different vision of the indigenous world in the century before the Conquest.

POETRY: His books of poetry include Scorched Birth (2004), Columbus in the Bay of Pigs (1991), and Decade: the 1990s (1987); Tidal News (1982); Cosmic Athletics (1980); Ride the Wind, (1979); The San Francisco General Strike (1978); Insurrection/Resurrection (1975); Commu 1 (1971); Change/Tears (1967).

"Scorched Birth is a book of wonders." Jack Hirschman

"A Master Poet who uses language in a remarkable, innovative way, he gives us information on contradictions in the evolving state of human consciousness." Mary Rudge

"His is the wholistic vision of Whitman, a hologram
of fragments--each of which mirrors the inner harmonies as they leap out at you, all like circuits
wired to some luminous inner board." Art Goodtimes

'The procreative force, the cosmic sensibility, the
oracular insight Curl brings to the reader is constantly astonishing." Roger Taos

"Pages of truth... It will be hard for me to live each day without quoting from Columbus in the Bay of Pigs." Dennis Banks

THEATER: His play The Trial of Christopher Columbus was produced by the PEN Oakland Writers Theater in Berkeley (2009)

VIDEOS: The Heights of Hungry Coyote (1990); The Columbus Invasion (1991)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid, insightful and full of love, January 12, 2010

By 

Angel "Rainbow Suckafish" (Freeville, Earth, Outer space) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memories of Drop City: The first hippie commune of the 1960's and the Summer of Love (Paperback)

I dug it.

As I go looking for the future of the hippies, I reach back to see where it started. He was there a 100% and it shows. Drop city was pivotal in the back to the earth movements now and than. It's was important then when people were looking for a better way. More important now as we learn from the mistakes of those that came before. Very few people that were in the hurricanes eye of that cultural revolution told there stories and of those that did, few did it as well as Ishmael (as used to be called). Not only did he survive the countless insane revolutions, he kept positive and activated, where so many of his comrades became jaded and disillusioned. Then he took the time to share. What a gift, a mirror, a lesson.
If you're at all interested in those pioneers of the heart and mind that came before, you'll dig it too and be inspired by the whackiness of those days. It'll make you sad you weren't there at the genesis of many positive things, but glad to see so many tried so hard and in fact made the world a better place.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Curl missed his chance to provide in-depth insights into Drop City, December 31, 2010

By 

ABC - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memories of Drop City: The first hippie commune of the 1960's and the Summer of Love (Paperback)

I bought this book for a school paper about self-reliant communities and expected to find details about how Drop City operated, day-to-day information. How did members support themselves financially? If they worked, where? Where did they get their food from? What did they eat (there was very little info on this)? What were their criteria for choosing this land (again, superficially touched on)? If they had planned to be self-reliant, then why did they purchase land on saline ground? What about the potable water situation? Where did the waste go? Did they use a septic system? What about doing laundry? Where they completely supplied with solar energy? Feeding the babies? So many questions, and more, that Curl provided no answer to.

If you want to read anecdotes about people getting drugged, hook up for promiscuous sex, then get into jealous games with their partners, and overall fight a lot, then you may find this book entertaining.
But if you are looking for apparently impossible to find information on the details of this place, or an actual autobiography of John Curl, then you won't find it here.

Some parts made me laugh out loud, but much of this book made me wonder about the level of intelligence of many members, judging by their language, thoughts, and behaviour.
At the end, Curl makes a haphazard attempt of analyzing what went wrong at Crop City. I only wish he had done more. For me, this was a wasted opportunity to compose a historical account of a community so eccentric and yet so ordinary.