Home Sweet Filthy Hippy Lair
This is why we left PC. My memory of the events is somewhat hazy. I had been sick all day and Donna actually woke me up to tell me that there were cars parked up and down the block; like, maybe, cop cars.
This had been a Summer of harassment and arrests at The Head Shop - they would come in and plant things even after we had scoured the place to make sure there was nothing in "the house"; they'd arrest our band for vagrancy when they took their break, they would arrest our patrons and mace them in their cells, cut their hair, say crappy things to the women. etc - our residence, which is where most of us stayed, was clean as a whistle.
Plus I was sick, dammit. I went to sleep.
Was the Chicago Convention near Labor Day or am I melding the two? At any rate, we woke up early that morning to the sound of breaking glass and swatestesterone dripping from the 27 law enforcement officers who were effecting a search warrant of our house, the "filthy hippy lair" as the paper described it the next day.
When no drugs were found they arrested everyone for loitering, others for "disorderly conduct (shacking)." They ransacked the place and then the fire marshals that accompanied them declared it a fire hazard which had to be vacated.
Donna and I (the lease was in our name and we were married) set about the now familiar process of bailing everyone out in time for the club to open.
Whether it was Labor Day or not during this particular bust, the convention was going on. The parallels were astounding. Here we were. There they were. The cops even accentuated it by making fun of our politics and crowing about "their guy" George Wallace. It was at that moment that it became obvious to me that what was happening to us was happening all around the country.
We scurried to get everyone out, still trying to salvage the club. We got the bail money together. Got everyone home. Got them baths. Got them fed. All of this with the convention blaring on the TV.
For me the defining moment was when we returned to the club hoping to salvage the weekend by making the big lick. There they were. Bay County Sheriff squad cars. Ten or Twenty? it didn't matter. Blue lights on, they rang our club like there had been a murder there or something. Forget saving the club. No one came. We just went home.
We left Panama City pretty soon after that. My wife's mother came and helped us pack and we left that stinking rat hole. It's pretty bad when you escape to Alabama from somewhere but that's exactly what we did.
