Not fail to associate the Z of Zorro x Zodiac Z,
This poem by Allen Cohen, one of those responsible for the magazine, which had a store at the time, is literal (about someone who wanted a Zorro costume for the Hallowen), or metaphorical …
Marcelo

ZORRO
A man wearing old, brown
leather jacket, pants
slipping down his legs,
teeth missing from his mouth,
one of the mad wraiths
who haunt North Beach
asks me for a Zorro hat.
I give him black, flat crown,
wide brim Flamenco dancer hat.
He smiles toothlessly and says,
“That’s it!” He tries it on,
tilts it and looks into the mirror.
“You think I can do it, man.
You think I can be Zorro.”
“You can be whoever you want,” I answer.
“Zorro’s my hero, man
like Jesus is yours.”
“No, I am my own hero,” I say.
“I got to get the rest of it —
black on black and some steel.”
He pretends to whip out a sword.
“You think I can do it, man?
Am I Zorro?”
“Go for it, if you want.”
“Will you hold it for me, man.
I’ll be back before Halloween.
I’ll be back.

http://s91990482.onlinehome.us/allencohen/poetry/zorro.pdf

Haha! I found this yesterday when I googled "Waller Press" and my POI. That copy of the Oracle–not the Zorro poem. Gosh, that’s a great find!

Oracle mentioned here:

https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexableconten … 20b52c080c

(Exerpt to give you insight into time, place, people who made up this underground culture, philosophies, etc.)

As with Bill Graham’s Appeal Benefits, the interaction between a market orientation
and a civic impulse was especially crucial to fostering this new sort of public sphere. Though
he called Castell and Harmon "the first hippie entrepreneurs," guitarist Darby Slick noticed
that the first Tribute possessed an energy quite removed from the preexisting rock dance
concerts. At the "Tribute to Dr. Strange," according to Slick, "The atmosphere was so
completely different than at the commercial concerts put on by Big Daddy Tom Donahue at
the Cow Palace."77
The gathering transformed the detritus of popular culture, the
disembodied junk of mass consumerism, into half-sardonic icons and idols for a new civic
religion.
The idea of ritualistic "tributes" to comic book heroes and villains stood at the center
of this inventive use of popular culture as the seedbed for a new civics. A public emerged by
paying tribute to new legends and gods, by suggesting new myths and allegories. The names
of the cartoon characters were rich enough in themselves — Dr. Strange, Sparkle Plenty,
Ming the Merciless all fit with the new spirit of costume-wearing, psychedelic drug
hallucinations, and a heightened sense of the larger world as full of life-and-death struggles
that were at once real (as in the growing conflict in Vietnam or the racial tensions erupting in
the urban United States during the mid-1960s) and — especially for the young-adult students,
mostly white and middle-class — fantastical, comical, distant, and mediated (thanks to the
booming consumer economy).
76
Selvin, Summer of Love, 27.
77
Slick, Don’t You Want Somebody, 51, 56.
122
Dr. Strange, Sparkle Plenty, and Ming the Merciless had more intriguing allegorical
meanings buried within their cartoonish figures. As comic book historian Bradford Wright
has pointed out in a history of comic books, Dr. Strange, a surgeon who loses his ability to
practice medicine in a car accident, descends into alcoholism, travels to the Orient, trains
with a guru named the Ancient One, then returns to Greenwich Village in New York to
become an aloof, mysterious superhero, "remarkably predicted the youth counterculture’s
fascination with Eastern Mysticism and psychedelia." Appearing in the early 1960s with
some of Steve Ditko’s "most surrealistic work" creating a "disorienting, hallucinogenic
quality," the comic drew upon the "mystical spells, trances, astral travel, and occult lore" of
"pulp-fiction magicians" as well as material from 1950s Beat culture.78
Figure 1.6. Handbill for The Family Dog’s first rock dance and concert, "A Tribute to Dr.
Strange," October 16, 1965 (artist: Ami Magill, courtesy: www.chickenonaunicycle.com)
78
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 213.
123
Sparkle Plenty, a female character, was the mysteriously beautiful baby boomer
offspring of two noir-ish Dick Tracy characters: the rowdy, smelly, crooked, but faithful-toTracy
B. O. Plenty and the reclusive gravel pit owner Gertie Gravel. A tribute to Sparkle
Plenty seemed implicitly to celebrate the arrival of the baby boomers themselves in the
public sphere — Sparkle Plenty was the modernized, beautified girl arising from the stinking
pits (quite literally) of the hardscrabble Great Depression and World War II years. Ming the
Merciless offered a more mysterious flirtation with evil — this Marvel comics villain, an
Oriental caricature who fought Flash Gordon, at times sprinkling the earth with a plague dust
that cast an LSD-like spell — was exiled from Mongo when Flash Gordon becomes leader
there after defeating him.
The iconography of the handbills for the Family Dog Tributes moved these comic
book characters from popular culture to a vernacular setting. Unlike the super-stylized dance
concert posters and handbills that would follow in their wake, the Family Dog Tribute fliers
created by Ami Magill, who would go on to become a staff artist at the San Francisco
Oracle, look most of all like doodles on a high school notebook. But so, too, they presage
the more adventurous and advanced graphic developments of the later posters in that they are
rejections of the standard show flier. The "Tribute to Dr. Strange" handbill is far different
even from Bill Graham’s Appeal Benefit announcements. In the place of clear lines,
organized boxes and evenly-spaced, standardized fonts are line drawings that spiral and
swirl, grow denser and more sparse in unpredictable, uneven ways, gather like moss around
the unbalanced bubble letters tumbling over each other to spell "The Family Dog Presents,"
then open up in blankness around the script that reads "Tribute."
124
Magill replaced symbols and signifiers of professional distance and authority with
amateurish immediacy and intimacy, even with a kind of alluring beckoning to membership
in a new, secret society. The letters themselves are invaded by doodles and lines as abstract
flames, enlarging dots, and reptilian spires engulf the words. The handbill conveys a sense of
homemade intrigue and mystery. It is off the cuff and insistent all at once. As if the drawing
might have become utterly illegible and inscrutable if left in the hands of its maker any
longer, Magill’s announcement seems to be in the process of disappearing — or is it peeking
out alluringly from — behind the tangled web of doodled iconography.
Part of the message is clear and familiar: the handbill announces a return to the teenage
form of the "Rock n Roll Dance and Concert," hosted by a famous local radio disc
jockey, in this case Russ "The Moose" Syracuse, whose surreal nighttime show on the
station KYA featured bomb sound effects for bad songs and attracted a cult following among
Bay Area music fans. So, too, the venue, the Longshoreman’s Hall at Fisherman’s Wharf,
had housed dances for teenagers before, as well as jazz concerts. But, except to the initiated,
the bands were mostly unfamiliar. Moreover, their names were particularly odd and surreal,
quite different from the sensible names of most rock and roll groups: the Jefferson Airplane,
the Charlatans, the Marbles, and even a band named, bizarrely, perhaps sarcastically, after
President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious new governmental program to wipe out poverty, the
Great Society.
Finally, to add to the oddness of the handbill, the entire event was a tribute — not to a
musician or even to a political or social cause — but to a comic book character with a
particularly evocative moniker, Dr. Strange. The handbill seemed to herald some sort of
secret new order beckoning just beyond a familiar door. Fashioned in part out of the
125
economic necessity of constructing a cheap poster with a limited budget, the announcement
for the Family Dog Tribute to Dr. Strange also manifested the relocation of material from
mass-produced culture into a new vernacular, civic realm.
Figure 1.7. Handbill for The Family Dog’s second rock dance and concert, "A Tribute to
Sparkle Plenty," October 24, 1965 (artist: Ami Magill, courtesy:
www.chickenonaunicycle.com)
As the handbill suggested, the Family Dog events were not just tributes to comic
book characters; they were also tributes to the rock and roll dance concert itself. Rock and
roll dance-concerts themselves were rooted in an existing teen culture dating back to the
1950s, and before that to the jazz and swing dances of the 1920s and 1930s. Ralph Gleason
made the linkage explicit, explaining that the Family Dog Tributes were, "founded, of
126
course, on the basic teen-age dances."79
Continuing in the tradition of radio personality Big
Daddy Tom Donahue’s concerts at the Cow Palace, the Family Dog events even had the
requisite commercial radio disc jockey in attendance: DJ Russ "The Moose" Syracuse. But
the Family Dog Tributes transformed the typical teen dance into something else.
In place of the awkward adolescent couple dancing, according to Gleason, something
more liberatory, ritualistic, and erotically-charged took place. "There were people who
simply leaped like campfire girls skipping ’round the maypole, all night long," Gleason
noticed.80
The open-ended combination of drug experimentation, music, dancing, and
costumes led to a festival atmosphere in which, observers such as Gleason believed, a new
morality was emerging. Centered around new modes of self-expression and group
interaction, it challenged dominant structures of self, family, marketplace, and even
government. To Gleason, the music and the dance drew upon the existing popular culture,
but transformed it to presage larger social transformations.
Luria Castell shared this hopeful, utopian interpretation. "There’ll be no trouble when
they [the kids] can dance," she told Gleason. "Music is the most beautiful way to
communicate. It’s the way we’re going to change things," she decided.81
Light-hearted,
humorous farce and serious feelings of making history mingled at the Family Dog Tributes.
Luria Castell remembered it as, "Almost a religious kind of thing, but not dogma, unlocking
that tension and letting it come out in a positive way with the simple health of dancing and
79
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 7.
80
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 7.
81
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 3.
127
getting crazy once a month or so."82
Key to the religious impulse that Castell described was the unleashing of erotic
energy among gatherings of strangers.83
As Vito Acconci writes about urban public spheres:
"The public space of the city is the presence of other bodies: public space is an analogue for
sex." If "public space lives up to its name," according to Acconci, it "functions to bring sex
out into the open: you liberate yourself into public space…. Public space is the refusal of
monogamous relationships and the acceptance of sex that has no bonds and knows no
bounds."84
Describing the tradition of Family Dog dances that began with the Tributes and
continued at the Avalon Ballroom and other venues under the auspices of Chet Helms, one
observer commented that, "The people who have been forming the mass audience for the
Family Dog presentations are the psychedelic generation — humans who have begun to wake
up, to seek release from the bonds of ego, to express their latent sensuality."85

Another good read about San Francisco and the counterculture is "Haight Ashbury" by Charles Perry available in a pdf-

http://www.cjayarts.com/pages/library/C … shbury.pdf

And there is "A Trumpet To Arms: Alternative Media In America" by David Armstrong.

I couldn’t find a pdf of this book online but it is searchable here-

https://books.google.com/books?id=1cmwp … 22&f=false