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Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll ’67: The Bad End of the Summer of Love – By bob-calhoun – August 16, 2017 – SF Weekly

Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll ’67: The Bad End of the Summer of Love – By bob-calhoun – August 16, 2017 – SF Weekly

Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll ’67: The Bad End of the Summer of Love – By bob-calhoun – August 16, 2017 – SF Weekly
August 17
09:34 2017

Paul McCartney visited the Haight in May 1967 to spin a copy of the still-unreleased Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the members of Jefferson Airplane. The Summer of Love hadn’t quite begun, and the mood was still optimistic. George Harrison and his wife Pattie swung through Haight Street and Hippie Hill on Aug. 7. Asked what he thought of the scene, the quiet Beatle said, “If it’s all like this, then it’s really too much.” And it was. The Summer of Love was giving way to fall, the dying season.Just four days earlier, on Thursday, Aug. 3, most of the body of John Kent Carter, 25, was found in his Parnassus Heights apartment. Carter was an out-of-work flutist who went by “Shob” and dealt acid to make the bills. When found, he had been stabbed in the chest, and his arm was chopped off just above the elbow.A trail of blood showed where Shob had been dragged from the living room to the bedroom of what the Chronicle called a “brightly decorated pad,” covered in “the colorful swirls and sunbursts of psychedelic art.” Carter’s battered VW van, a handgun, and $3,000 he and his girlfriend were saving for a trip to Europe had all gone missing — along with his arm.Two days later, on Saturday, Aug. 5, Sebastapol police Officer Charles Baker arrested Eric Dahlstrom at 11 p.m. for speeding through the sleepy town in Carter’s stolen van. Inside, police found Carter’s loaded 9-millimeter P38 automatic, $2,657.53 in cash, a whole mess of pills, and the missing arm.“He had this arm rolled up in leather, shammy-like material,” Baker, now retired and still living in Sebastopol, tells SF Weekly during a recent phone interview. “There were several shammies it was rolled up in. I’d unroll one, and find another shammy. It went through that about three times, and out popped the arm.“It was sort of a shock, you know, to see that kind of thing,” Baker adds.Dahlstrom, looking dirty and harried in old newspaper photographs, was a 26-year-old daredevil motorcycle racer from Sebastopol. He had just taken the top prize in the Cotati Motorcycle Grand Prix in May, but things were already going wrong. He told reporters that he had been on an 18-month LSD binge when he killed Carter over some bad acid.“[Carter] was convulsing as he went down,” Dahlstrom told the Examiner during a jailhouse interview. “That’s why I stabbed him some more — maybe a little too much. I hadn’t had life in my hands before like that.”Dahlstrom couldn’t explain why he chopped off Carter’s arm with a butcher knife.“The hand is a man’s history,” Dahlstrom said. “I’m a Cancer. I’m not a hard person, normally.”

Source: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll ’67: The Bad End of the Summer of Love – By bob-calhoun – August 16, 2017 – SF Weekly

About Author

Martin Nethercutt

Martin Nethercutt

Martin A Nethercutt is a writer, singer, producer and loves music. Creative Director at McCartney Studios Editor-in-Chief at McCartney Times Creator-in-Chief at Geist Musik President (title) at McCartney Multimedia, Inc. Went to Albert-Schweitzer-Schule Kassel Lives in Playa del Rey From Kassel, Germany Married to Ruth McCartney

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