THE CATALOG OF COOL'S HIPSTER SAINT: GEORGE HUNTER
George Hunter took paisley, Victoriana, Maxfield Parrish, Marvel Comics, the Wild West, and rock and roll and synthesized something so unique, so patently new and wonderfully appropriate that it overnight became the de rigueur aesthetic of San Francisco's flowering Golden Age.
by Davin Seay
It was 1965 and, sure, something the hilly ascents of Frisco's Barbary was happening. But it wasn't only Mr. Coast, what this new and verging scene Jones who didn't know what it was-no looked or sounded like. Fact was, ripe one had the foggiest idea, out there on as the Sixties were to happen, scant few at this halfway point in the decade had the imagination or simple chutzpah to manhandle all that seething energy and make of it style, attitude, and history.
George Hunter knew. What he knew gave grand design and color to the age. George Hunter took paisley, Victoriana, Maxfield Parrish, Marvel Comics, the Wild West, and rock and roll and synthesized something so unique, so patently new and wonderfully appropriate that it overnight became the de rigueur aesthetic of San Francisco's flowering Golden Age. What he created-a gaslight aura lighting the mysterious, the marvelous, the magnificent comers of his own fecund imagination-may, in this benighted age, seem hopelessly anachronistic and squarethose bell bottoms and Western vests, the blue of a Parrish sky, and the tongue-twisting oaths of Dr. Strange.
Yet the originality of his vision endures, regardless of what cretinous entrepreneurs were later to make of it. Even today, when every fern-decked, stained-glassed, and natural-wooded emporium of the Me Decade stands as a shameless denuding of the spirit of Hunter. George Hunter's world was simply fantastic, with its progenitor a rare original in the classic mold of the Dandy.
Scion of a well-to-do SoCal family, Hunter studied architecture at San Francisco State, where he discovered a coterie of like-minded proto-hipples like Jerry Garcia, Darby Slick, and the members of Hunter's own wigged-out idea of what a rock and roll band should be-the Charlatans. The name had more than a euphonious significance. Hunter had birthed the band more as a vehicle for his inspired visual constructs than as a musical entity. He himself could hardly play a note and usually occupied himself onstage banging a tambourine or strumming an inaudible autoharp. Before the band played a single rehearsal, Hunter had snapped hundreds of publicity stills, featuring the quintet in an inexhaustible variety of turn-of-the-century regalia salvaged from San Francisco thrift stores. They played their first gig in Virginia City, Nevada, and were right at home with the burg's weirdo population, who fancied themselves gunslingers and wore the sidearms to prove ft. Returning to San Francisco, they found themselves certified culture stars and Hunter's ragtime pop art the standard for everything from dance posters to fashion to apartment decor.
The Summer of Love followed and the world beat a path to the Haight Ashbury, palms upturned to gather the manna of drug-addled truth. Hippies became homogeneous, but ft was all over for Hunter, at precisely the moment ft had begun for everyone else.
(in its seventh issue-that of March 1968-Rolling Stone, itself a newcomer, pronounced the Charlatans dead, and touted such fresh copy as Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.) Hunter's private dream was public domain-it was time to move on.
After starting a graphic arts studio, a restaurant, and a family (featuring a son named Maxwell), Hunter currently languishes in relative obscurity in Marin County, operating a modest woodworking concern. Whatever his ultimate fate, his gilt-edged originality will forever transcend the sad demise of the time in which it was unveiled to a sleeping world.
(As of this writing, plans are afoot to release the Charlatans' LP, cut in 1966. It's uncertain whether the original ad copy will be used to announce its arrival. "Remedy for a Drugged Market.")