Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

The author looks back on his journey through the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, offering portraits of his fellow activists and hippies

This autobiographical look at 1960s hippie culture from the point of view of actor Coyote (E.T., Outrageous Fortune, etc.) tends more toward observation than introspection. Coyote began his sojourn in the counterculture with the San Francisco Mime Troupea ground-breaking experiment in political theater that led almost immediately to Coyote's long-standing association with the strongly antiestablishment Digger group, which preached a sort of Emersonian self-reliance based on the philosophical freedoms of mankindwhich included the freedom, for instance, to steal what you think is yours. Coyote wandered from commune to commune, all the while crossing paths with the famous and soon-to-be-famous, including music promoter Bill Graham, the musician Michael Bloomfield, and the Beat poet Gary Snyder. In the meantime, he also made the acquaintance of several members of the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, and these connections and other societal pressures led Coyote into a heroin habit that was cured only after he was treated by an Indian shaman. Still, after this cure Coyote continues to abuse drugs. Because he never does fully address the matter of his drug dependence, or his complex relationship with Sam, his lover and the mother of his daughter, the book never seems to have much heft as a self-excavation. Its really only Coyote's troubled relationship with his abusive but brilliant father that gets the attention from the author that it requires. Equally disturbing and unexamined are Coyote's friendships with the openly racist Hell's Angels, as well as the frequent appearance of guns in what many might assume had been a peaceful subculture. (A part of this book, under the title Carlas Story, won the 1994 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction.) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Coyote not only survived the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies but emerged from years of journeying through the counterculture to achieve success as an actor. Considering the numerous casualties among radicals, who, like Coyote, were heroin junkies living on the edge of society, this is a rare feat. In this frank yet sensitive memoir of those years, Coyote contradicts romantic notions of communes by recalling the discord and petty disagreements typical in his own communal living experiences at Olema ranch and Red House. He describes the chaos created by the Diggers, an antiestablishment group of which he is usually considered a founding member and leader, famous for their stores where everything was given away free, and he remembers his stoned life in Haight-Ashbury. Eventually, he surfaced to work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for which he received a special Obie Award. Coyote's thoughtful, articulate writing displays a compassionate wisdom that puts this chronicle in a class above the typical actor's autobiography. Highly recommended for relevent subject collections in academic as well as public libraries.?Richard W. Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Film actor Peter Coyote recounts his exploits in the 1960s and '70s in this literate insider's account of the San Francisco/Northern California hippie scene. As a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and, later, the Diggers, Coyote (the name is totemic) was at the center of the action and a witness to many of the era's countercultural events. He colors the historical perspective of those events with highly personal memories of his life on the road and in various urban and rural communes. He also resurrects long-dead ghosts: Emmett Grogan, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, poet Lew Welch, not to mention the idealism that propelled the whole movement. While avoiding the pitfalls of nostalgia, Coyote reflects on the serendipity of his own life, from upper-middle-class upbringing to heavy drug-user to Wall Street broker to chairman of the California Arts Council to respected and sought-after film actor. He is at once contented and optimistic, and occasionally apologetic; the zeitgeist that informed Coyote 30 years ago has not abandoned him. Frank Caso