Diamond Dave still sparkling , (June 2006)

By Breezy Duncan

Dave Whitaker remembers when Jack Kerouac burst into Jack’s Pool Hall in 1957 holding the novel that shaped generations of America’s youth.

“He ran in with his first copy of On the Road,” Whitaker said. “He had just got it in the mail. He had been waiting and waiting, and it finally got there.”

That day marked the quiet beginning of a subversive movement that spread through the underground and blossomed into the '67 Summer of Love.

And Whitaker, universally known as Diamond Dave, was rapturously entangled in every move of the Beat Generation, as well as the hippie movement and all manner of revolution that followed.

“I met the firsts of the Bohemian anarchists in Chicago,” Diamond Dave said. “I was just out of high school and that was my first ride on a freight train, from Minneapolis to Chicago. That gave me the thirst to travel, the thirst to be on the road.”

During the fall of what was meant to be his first year at college, Diamond Dave left the East Coast altogether. He did not let his parents know that he was leaving until after he arrived in California.

“I was supposed to be a freshman at the University of Minnesota, and I picked up a copy of The Nation magazine and there was an article by Kenneth Rexroth,” Diamond Dave said. “He was one of the progenitors of the hip generation and a really good poet. He was part of the generation before the Beats; a true Bohemian.”

What Diamond Dave was looking for was in San Francisco.

“By the time I got here, I thought I was way too late," he said. "I thought the Bohemian life was over after World War II, but here it was beginning again in San Francisco and New York City.

“Something was happening. All these poets were coming to North Beach, where we first heard the term ‘Beat Generation.’ It began with Kerouac.”
For nearly 40 years, Diamond Dave has been one of many poetry spinning patrons of the Rainbow family residing in the Haight-Ashbury. At one point, he was regularly referred to as “The Mayor of Haight Street.”

Those who found San Francisco before the madness of the 1960s became a close knit group, often meeting at an establishment called The Place in North Beach after the bars closed at 2 a.m.

The Place hosted the area's first open mic, Blabbermouth Night, every Wednesday. It was a natural epicenter of creativity.

“Anybody had five minutes to do whatever they liked,” Diamond Dave said. “All the poets would take turns, and whoever captured the imagination of the audience got a bottle of champagne. They would open it up and take a swig and pass it on to the crowd. It was a cool spot, one of the coolest on the planet. It was just that handful of people who were brought together to change history, herstory and hipstory.”

The handful of intellectuals was slowly becoming an entire generation of wanderers. They descended upon Haight Street looking for the freedom and family that Diamond Dave had already found.

“In 1964 began the first gatherings in the parks, the first gatherings of the tribes,” he said. “It started as a trickle, looking for people who had longer hair and who’s beards were getting longer. We could see something was happening.

“But the trickle of people very quickly became a stream, a river, a mighty torrent, all up and down Haight Street. People in the know would get off the street and hang out at Hippie Hill on Sunday.”

One of the individuals who found themselves in the Haight after dropping out of college was a young Bob Dylan. Diamond Dave gave him a book, Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory.

“He said that book changed his life, that he had no idea that people lived this way,” Diamond Dave said. “It was all new to him, that whole circle."
While Dylan began developing his iconic style of folk music, Diamond Dave was exploring the plethora of psychedelics around him. He was becoming a hippie.

“Beatnik plus LSD equals hippie,” he said. “When the sun came up, we went down into the cellars. And then maybe in the late afternoon when the sun went down, we came up again.”

By the early 70s, his hippie friends had taken to calling him Diamond Dave.
“I think I was Diamond Dave before David Lee Roth. It was like diamond in the rough, I think. It was kind of a joke.”

In the ‘80s, Diamond Dave became involved in the punk and hardcore music scenes emerging in San Francisco. He counted MDC and Verbal Abuse as close friends, often acting as poet laureate and introducing MDC before their set.

“I would get up on stage and say, ‘Here they are. Millions of Dead Cops, Missile Destroyed Civilization, Multi-Death Corporation. MDC!’”

He also hung out with Agent Orange, Agnostic Front, and Instant Asshole.

“Punk rock keeps me young,” Diamond Dave said. “You just have to go into it with an open mind, and you’ll see it’s a great adventure. You go to a show and see all your friends and hang out.”

Diamond Dave served lunch and dinner to the Dicks and DRI at the Haight Street Soup Kitchen off of Belvedere. Once a week, he made his famous Rock ‘n Roll spaghetti.

Times got rough for Diamond Dave as he began battling alcoholism in the early ‘90s.

“I used to be drinking all the time,” he said. “I always had a bottle of malt liquor inside my coat.”

Diamond Dave was moving into the Mission nine years ago when he heard the low, thunderous rhythm of Native American drums.

“I was almost through my sixth or seventh malt liquor of the day and it was only noon. Instead of getting another bottle I followed the drums,” he said, “and saw it was all Indians there. Those are my roots too.

“They let me stay for the drums until one of the brothers came over and said ‘I’m sorry, you’re going to have to leave because you’ve been drinking. This is a celebration.’ They were celebrating 90 days of sobriety.”

Realizing that it was an alcohol recovery group, Diamond Dave made a decision. He asked when the next meeting was.

“I said, ‘I’ll be there.’ I really wanted to do it,” he said. “I was really struggling with it.”

Almost a decade later, Diamond Dave wears a pendant around his neck as a symbol of his sobriety. A coin, suspended from a beaded string, bears an old Indian prayer that Diamond Dave has repeated from memory for many years.
“I know it would be really hard, if not impossible, to drink with this around my neck.”

When Diamond Dave fell on hard times, he often spent nights at the Polytechnic High School gymnasiums squatting with other homeless people.. On several nights he got a very rude awakening.

“The police would come in and arrest us,” he said. “Trespassing is the only crime you can commit while sleeping. One minute, you’d be asleep and the next you’d wake up handcuffed to a bench in the police station. It was ridiculous. The buildings were empty.”

These days, Diamond Dave devotes much of his time to helping others in need. After spending years at neighborhood soup kitchens, Diamond Dave helped the Rainbow Family cook hot food for those left hungry or homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

“We have a bunch of kitchens on busses, giant kitchens on wheels,” he said. “Just after Katrina, we realized that we were the ones who had to do something. We had the ability to just get started, to start feeding people. But they wouldn’t let us into New Orleans.”

The hardest hit parts of New Orleans were closed by the authorities. The group was told to head for Waveland, Mississippi instead. The area had also been devastated by the storm.

“We set up and just started cooking food. Soon we were feeding a couple thousand people a day breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he said. “We became REMA, the Rainbow Emergency Management Agency. We’re the best at what we do, cause there’s no bureaucracy.”

Since returning from the disaster relief effort, Diamond Dave has settled into retirement not far from the heart of the Haight. He works with the Volunteer Corps in the city helping middle school children with their English and reading poetry to them.

Diamond Dave is still a fixture on Haight Street, often walking up and down the street or playing air guitar at Coffee to the People. Some days, he takes to unnerving tourists and panhandlers alike.

He tried to talk a couple of tourists from Iowa into taking a picture of a "real, live hippie" at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. And when asked for change by a young man holding a cardboard sign, Diamond Dave told him deftly to "get it from the tourists. That's what they're here for."

As the sun set on Hippie Hill, Diamond Dave lounged in the grass.

"I've got nothing to prove anymore," he said. "So we'll just see where it goes. Another generation will be picking it up and keeping it flowing. Different styles with something similar in mind."

Catch Diamond Dave's monthly poetry open mic on second Tuesdays at 6pm in the Park Branch Library: 1833 Page Street.