Autobiography by Emmett Grogan, non-leader of the Diggers.

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Product Description

"Ringolevio" is the memorable tale of Emmett Grogan and the Diggers, the irreverent urban guerrillas anti masters and masters of street theater who made San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury a home, putting on Grateful Dead dances in Golden Gate Park, ladling out free stew to all comers in the park's Panhandle, and keeping the peace with the cops. While Kesey's Merry Prankster's were off tripping the light fantastic, the Diggers were transforming the Haight from a seedy district of abandoned Victorian houses into an evanescent paradise on earth.

For anyone who thinks that those were days only of peace, love and flower power, Ringolevio will be a revelation, as it evokes the gritty urban sensibility that supplied the backbone to the community's free flights of fancy.

Vastly entertaining, Ringolevio is at once high adventure, political screed, social history. and hyperbolic memoir. This classic traces the story of Emmett Grogan, a larger-than-life sixties legend of great controversy, from the streets of New York to the heights of the Haight.

Citadel Underground's edition of Ringolevio features a new introducing by the actor Peter Coyote, one of Grogan's oldest friends, a fellow Digger and a veteran of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

"The San Francisco Diggers combined Dada street theater with the revolutionary politics of free". Slum-alley saints, they lit up the period by spreading the poetry of love and anarchy with broad strokes of artistic genius. Their free store, communications network of instant offset survival poetry, along with an Indian-inspired consciousness, was the original white light of the era. Emmett Grogan was the hippie warrior par excellence. He was also a junkie, amaniac, a gifted actor, a rebel hero, ...and above all a pain in the ass to all his friends. Ringolevio is half-brilliant". -- Abbie Hoffman

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1137184 in Books
• Published on: 1990-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 532 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Grogan, one of the original "Diggers," who maintained "free stores" for the poor in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury during the late 1960s, here offers what PW judged "a compelling autobiography. . . . Grogan grips the reader with his bizarre odyssey and his insights into the New Generation and some of its famous personalities." QPB selection.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.” –Dennis Hopper

“Of all those activists, Hopper thought the most interesting was the late Emmett Grogan, who ran the Diggers, a group that gave away food and clothing. Hopper thinks that Grogan's romanticized autobiography, Ringolevio, is the best book dealing with the '60s. The title was a New York street game ‘of life and death.’ ‘Grogan thought that anybody who ever played that game would learn their position in life,’ Hopper said. ‘He was out of New York, studied film making with Antonioni. He was a jewel thief, a heroin addict and then came to San Francisco and started the Diggers. He had a lot of charisma.’” –The San Francisco Chronicle

“Emmett Grogan was a wonderful storyteller, and Ringolevio is a great book.” –Jerry Garcia

“It wouldn’t be surprising if Emmett Grogan–‘60s underground hero, prime mover of the Digger movement in San Francisco–were to come back to life. To know Grogan–a wild phenomenon who made the world his stange and could strut more in a month than Olivier played in a lifetime–was to entertain such possibilities.” –The Boston Globe

“A kind of case study that reappraises the '60s unapologetically but honestly, noting the mistakes and excesses, but also acknowledging some of the things that came from it that we should be proud of. Most people are afraid to admit how much fun it was." –Peter Coyote

Grogan was “the underground superstar of the counterculture, a young man whom everyone who was hip had heard of but whom no one could ever find…Wherever it was happening in the 1960’s, Emmett Grogan was there.” –The New York Times

“This autobiography is at once an amazing example of romantic self-mythologizing and a broad history of the hippie movement of the late nineteen-sixties…Mr. Grogan writes so clearly that he almost convinces us that the whole story could be true.” –The New Yorker

“Grogan…who blends idealism with cold-blooded nastiness, sets forth in this playback not only his own life and times–but also what it means to be on the other side of the barricades, away from the hearth where the bowls aren’t always full…Grogan’s chronicle of his life in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco…is most interesting.” –The New York Times Book Review

“The autobiography of a sometime saint…an astonishing mass of raw experience. It blows myths, settles scores and leaves one pondering the invisible rules by which history and individuals impinge upon one another.” –Life

“Superman of the Underground.” –The Times (London)

“Emmett Grogan is the nom de plume of a youthful author whose autobiography Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps will likely cause a stir when it is published.” –Publishers Weekly

A “lengthy, indulgent but intermittently fascinating autobiography of head Digger Emmett Grogan.” –The Washington Post

“The story of the San Francisco Diggers, pioneers of the Haight-Ashbury scene, told engagingly by the head Digger himself.” –The San Francisco Chronicle

“[The San Francisco Diggers] combined Dada street theater with the revolutionary politics of free. Slum-alley saints, they lit up the period by spreading the poetry of love and anarchy with broad strokes of artistic genius. Their free store, communications network of instant offset survival poetry, along with Indian-inspired consciousness, was the original white light of the era. Emmett Grogan was the hippie warrior par excellence. He was also a junkie, a maniac, a gifted actor, a rebel hero, …and above all a pain in the ass to all his friends. Ringolevio [is] half-brilliant.” –Abbie Hoffman

About the Author
Emmett Grogan (c.1943—1978) was born Eugene Grogan in Brooklyn, New York. Called a “Superman of the Underground” by The Times (London), he was the founder of the Diggers, a legendary anarchistic group in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s that supplied free food, housing, and medical aid to runaways. On April 6, 1978, the thirty-five-year-old Grogan was found dead on a subway car in New York City, possibly of a drug overdose. Besides his autobiography, Grogan was the author of Final Score, a fictional crime novel.

Peter Coyote is an actor, activist, novelist, songwriter, and Emmy-winning voice-over artist. After a short apprenticeship at the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he became a prominent member of the San Francisco counterculture community and a founding member of the Diggers. His memoir is entitled Sleeping Where I Fall.

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Customer Reviews

The 'Gone With the Wind' of the Sixties
Ringoloevio is a game played by NYC street kids which lies somewhere between 'tag' and a gang fight.

This purportedly self auto-biographical book centers around Kenny Wisdom as he matures from street-wise punk to heroin addict to cat burglar; then follows him to Europe and back to the US, and onto his misadventures in the army and his relocation to the Haight in the early sixties, where he helps create the Diggers, a legendary (and well documented) group of people that sponsored free food and free concerts in Golden Gate Park where such luminaries and legends as the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin performed. Incisively written and indelible on one's memory once read, it stands as one either of the great first hand social histories of the sixties, or as one of the most imaginative fictions ever concieved.

When the book was first published in 1972, Peter Coyote's name was not listed as one of the authors.

From the inside jacket (1972 edition):
"He's America's most famous invisible man who, determined on keeping his identity anonymous, has fed deceptions to the press and let others use his name to the point where some people think he doesn't even exist ("Whenever a Digger identifies himself as 'Emmett Grogan'", the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "it means nothing, since all Diggers call themselves Emmett Grogan . . .")"

A sad book about a sadder life
While it is true, this is a wonderful, true-to-life autobiography of one of the central figures to the Haight-Ashbury scene, there is something fundamentally tragic about Grogan, especially if you read Peter Coyote's introduction and realize what happened to Grogan in the 1970s. Grogan was no bohemian intellectual, and so the reading is rough at times, but Grogan was a man who had an amazing amount of gaul, a joie-de-vivre, and a sense of daring that made his life fascinating... "a life played for keeps" as his subtitle tells us.

Unfortunately, at too early an age, that sense of daring led him to heroin. Perhaps because Grogan opens himself up so completely in "Ringolevio", one comes away from the book with a sense that somehow, despite Grogan's disappointment with the failure of the Haight-Ashbury adventure, he was going to be all right, he was going to find a new way to do his good work in this world. The book ends with a first-hand account of the Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway murder. Grogan was writing with hindsight, recognizing that the concert marked the end of the illusion: many residents of Haight Ashbury began to move away, or get into trouble, and it didn't take long before the whole gig was over. But Grogan seemed optimistic that he would find other gigs, equally as enriching as his years as a Digger in San Fransisco.

The first time I read this book it was a first edition copy, and I didn't have the benefit of knowing what happened to Grogan in the years following this book's publication. Reading Coyote's recollections of Grogan in the years after the book's publication - how financial success led Grogan back to the needle, and how the needle eventually claimed Grogan's life - makes the feigned optimism of Ringolevio's end all the more bittersweet.

I don't give it five stars because it reads at times like the work of a hack. Nonetheless, this is a fascinating document for anyone interested in the history of the Haight-AShbury community of the late 1960s, who the figures involved in the community were and what events shaped that community. And for the most part it seems honest, warts and all, not some nostalgia-tinged feel-good book about peace and love.

60's San Fran - the Summer of Love from a unique perspective
This is a unique view of the San Francisco/Haight-Ashbury hippie sub-culture. A third person autobiography that tells the story of a New York tough who journeys from the mean streets of Brooklyn to the acid-driven hills of San Francisco's summer of love. Absolutely indispensable to anyone looking to grasp a true sense of the forces driving the youth of this country in the turbulent 60's. And beyond this, a thoroughly enjoyable story, as much action-adventure as political statement. The only question left at the end of the book is whether "Emmett Grogan" really exists, or is he an amalgam of the children who forged the cultural revolution that affected all of us, regardless of which "side" we were on.