Comin’ Back To Me

“Strolling the hills overlooking the shore,
I realized I’d been here before . . .”

San Francisco’s Baker Beach, the one often seen in photos just to the left of the Golden Gate Bridge, is actually two beaches, divided in half by a large rock outcropping which makes access to the side closer to the Bridge quite difficult. Consequently, most people visit the beach on the other side of the rock barrier, where there is also a parking lot. Few ever bother to climb over to the other beach, especially when the tide is high.

During the summer of 1967, I had just graduated from high school and was home from the Catholic Seminary for vacation. Since Baker Beach was just a brief walk from my parents’ house, I would hike there in the mornings, and eventually I found a way down to the more secluded part of the beach.

Once on the shore, I discovered a small cave which had been partially underwater during high tide, but was now accessible. That day the fog was rolling in, and as I sat in the damp but pristine cave looking out towards the Pacific Ocean, I recalled a song from a local band, the Jefferson Airplane.

The Airplane used to play for free every Thursday at Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park, along with some of the other groups that would soon become known as the “San Francisco Sound”, which included The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, the Steve Miller Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and several others who were all in the process of releasing records that would become soundtracks for the Hippie Movement taking shape over at Haight and Ashbury across town.

The Airplane’s breakthrough album (Surrealistic Pillow) had been released earlier that year, and featured a hauntingly poignant tune called “Comin’ Back To Me”, written and sung by Marty Balin. Although I had never yet been in love, that particular song seemed such a close approximation to what being in love must feel like that I began to weep at the mere recollection of the lyrics, which apparently I had inadvertently memorized through repeated playings, and which now overwhelmed me with heart-throbbing sensations in that suddenly lonely cave.

Last night I read of Marty’s passing, and since I hadn’t listened to that song for some time, I found it on YouTube and thus unlocked a big box of memories from those heady days, a magical time when we all thought that the dawning revolution in the collective consciousness was going to infuse the world with love, peace, and freedom, end the wars, promote equality of races and genders, and initiate a new golden age.

I look back wistfully now, with a bit of sadness at what happened to our youthful idealism, but that feeling of being in love which the song once prompted will never fade, because love is the one true thing which will outlast all the insults the heart must bear in its long strange trip through this dreamy realm of doubt and wonder, with a little help from friends like Marty Balin whom we meet along the way.