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Shadow era telegraph7/3/2023 ![]() ![]() Eventually, they felt their car heading downhill instead of up. They crossed the Sierras during a blizzard, barely able to see the road. In Wyoming, after they locked themselves out of their car, the local sheriff let them in, looked them over, and then told them never to come back to town. ![]() They crashed on a floor somewhere in Ohio. The drive took three or four days, almost all of it through dreary, frozen fields. ![]() Frank had been living out in Berkeley, and he persuaded Joe to head back there with him. In 1969, just after he got laid off from his job, his youngest brother, Frank, came to town. There were places where you could get rice plates for a dollar, and a lot of days, one of those was all I ate.” (Joe Samberg) “My dad sent me $200 a month, which I used to pay rent for an apartment my brothers and I shared. Right: Two guys trip together on the curbside. Left: Kids walk up the steps of the “Telegraph Hilton,” a run-down boarding house above a clothing store called Rag Theater. All I knew was I was desperate to feel good again.” “What I was doing was grieving,” he says now. He watched the Velvet Underground play at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, then went back to dilapidated apartments to snort meth. He spent his free time in Harlem, seeing James Brown and other R&B singers at the Apollo Theater, or in the rough alphabet streets of the East Village, hanging out in Andy Warhol’s orbit. So he dropped out of Emerson College and moved down from Boston to Manhattan, where he found work at a color lab in midtown. I couldn’t find anything about school that would hold my attention for very long.” Six months later, his mother died of cancer. In 1965, his college girlfriend was killed in a car accident just as they were starting to talk about marriage. Joe often quips that he headed out west for the same reasons as Jojo in the Beatles song: “for some California grass.” But like most kids who landed in the San Francisco area during the late 1960s, he had very personal reasons for leaving his old life behind. The reality Joe saw was very much like the one the Atlantic author described: hordes of kids who had been lured to California by utopian ideals and then settled into a life of sex, drugs, and lethargy. They’ve been in my mind’s eye ever since, a counterpoint to all the popular images of peace signs, daisy chains, and Aquarian circle dances. Years later, when he was a highly regarded professional photographer-after he’d settled down and raised three children (including the comedian Andy Samberg)-he showed me some of his early portraits from Telegraph Avenue. Joe was part of it all, but he was also slightly outside of it, watching everything through the lens of his camera. Archie did win the fight, incidentally, but really, both of these guys just sort of collapsed from fatigue.” (Joe Samberg) And then there’s one of the young white girls, Vanessa-the thing that seems to fascinate her is how the black girls are so anxious about the fight. Then there are the three black girls holding onto each other, really pulling for the black guy, Archie, to win. Then you go all the way to the left, and you see this guy in a tie-dyed shirt just kind of like, ‘Ho hum, this is interesting,’ smoking his cigarette. “The guy on the right, with the Dutchboy haircut, is trying to be a peacemaker. “What I find really interesting about this picture is the people standing on the sidelines,” says Joe. ![]()
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