In September of 1967, two characters who didn’t know any better opened the Subterranean Circus in an old fertilizer warehouse on a nondescript sidestreet in Gainesville. The dust was thick, the lighting poor and the electrical wiring was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but the rent was right---$75 a month. Bill Killeen and Pamme Brewer stepped inside, parted the cobwebs and smiled in unison. “Paradise!”
And Paradise it was to the hundreds of thousands who dropped in over the next 23 years to buy hippie gear, solicit political support, find long-lost friends or barter for weed in the parking lot. While runaway kids across the nation headed for The City by the Bay, Florida runaways lit out for Gainesville, the exotic psychedelic land of free love, cheap music, endless crash pads and ample marijuana. The blacklight room in the Circus was the ultimate stoner shrine where wide-eyed hippies went to worship. Wise men like Eastern-religion-favoring Dick North were available for life counseling and body painting, primo salesman Danny Levine, a certified minister of the Universal Life Church, could marry you on the spot, agrarian hotshot Chuck LeMasters would sit you down and explain why your crops weren’t thriving.
Then one day, the Circus opened a clothing store next door called Silver City and hippie males could suddenly dress as wildly as women, and they did. The traditional clothing stores in town fell by the wayside, overtaken by young entrepreneurs selling bellbottoms, hiphuggers, Nehru and Cossack shirts, opaque angel dresses, sandals, beads and what-have-you, with the Sub Circus always leading the way.
All of this was not entirely approved by the Straight World, which attacked with scorn and derision, rocks thrown through windows, laws to prevent sales of drug-related paraphernalia and allegedly obscene books and posters…like, say, those from the obviously perverted Kama Sutra. Police raids ensued, trials took place, but for a very long time the hippies always won.
Nothing lasts forever except for memories, and the ones possessed by denizens of those times are strong and steady. They sharply remember those days of wine and roses and $15 lids and love in the afternoon, almost every afternoon. They recall those surreal acid tests at the band concerts, the helter-skelter love affairs, the freedom to chart their own courses for better or for worse, the certainty that they had created a brave new world which would stand the test of time. They remember, and now and then they return to spend poignant moments at the scene of the crimes, and they pause to wonder what might have happened to all those friends and roommates and lovers and ex-wives and husbands and one-night-standees. And then, on one fine day in May of 2022, they got to find out.
The Last Tango
Bill Killeen, who missed the olden times and lost friends as much as anyone decided that the year 2020, a little over 50 years from the summers of love, would be a propitious time to empty his wallet for a magnificent Homecoming of those old store workers and customers lost to the ages. Then Covid struck, routing the nation and taking two years to settle down. In the meantime, there was plenty of time to dot and cross all the appropriate letters, to lay the groundwork, to find a few bands to play music from a long ago era, to search out the right place to meet and greet, to find the right time between too hot and too cold and hotels too crowded. Despite the slings and arrows of occasionally outrageous fortune, the long-awaited Last Tango In Gainesville finally dawned on May 20, 2022, and it was a hallmark day in the lives of those who were there. They laughed, they cried, they slapped their foreheads in wonder as old friends emerged from the mists, some barely recognizable, as The Impostors played Strawberry Fields Forever or Nancy Luca sang American Girl or The Relics belted out Age of Aquarius. Of all the places in the world one could be, none were better than this special afternoon and evening in swooning Gainesville, Florida. If you weren’t there for the hugs and tears, you’re sad and disappointed and irked and penitent because such a day never was before and never will be again.
Unless…..
After the ball was over, Heartwood major domo Dave Melosh congratulated Killeen on his great success and said, “I’m hoping you’ll do it again some day.”
“Call me back when I’m 85,” replied the ringmaster. “Let’s see if the boat is still afloat.” Apparently, the vessel yet rides the waves. Bill turns 85 in November of 2025 and Dave is waiting by the phone booth, contract in hand. If all works out, he’ll get his wish. But if The Last Tango is truly the last, what comes next? Ah, what is that new sun rising above the mountain. It looks like The Grand Finale to us.
Since the Last Tango was advertised as a reunion for crew and customers of the Subterranean Circus (which meant just about everyone who was in town in the Glory Days), there were some who were wary of showing up at the party. Others, unaware of the event or oblivious to its sheer magnificence, took a pass and have been slamming their foreheads into the furniture ever since. Now, everybody gets another chance. The Grand Finale is a reunion for every lost soul, prodigal son, wayward daughter and criminal on parole who ever walked the special streets of Hogtown. We’re asking all of our readers to get the word out to the four corners of the Earth; to California dreamers, to Sasquatch chasers in the Pacific Northwest, to hermits marooned on the Kamchatka Peninsula, to Marty Jourard, sleeping in Seattle. It’s your last chance for a ribald hookup with Marianne in the back seat of your Studebaker, a final dalliance with the first guy who fed you LSD, a last look at the Old Town before it devolves into Sterileville. If you’re wondering whatever happened to the nubile Shirley, Naked Jeannie, Rod the Biker or fey Police Chief Wayland Clifton, maybe you’ll finally find out. True, we’re missing a frightening number of the old gang and more will fall through the gaping cracks in the next 26 months but others will hold on for dear life to make the journey to the ancient shrine. If you’re short on weed, down in the dumps, living in a festering boxcar in a Montana railyard and looking for something to live for, now you’ve got it. Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy, it’s the right time and the right place. And as the bard once advised, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. If you’ve still got any.
The Last Word
In the glorious wake of The Last Tango, people like Nancy Kay wrote suggestions on their Facebook pages that read “Let’s do it again and help Bill pay for it next time.” That’s not a bad idea, these things don’t come cheap. Instead of direct contributions to the cause, however, we’d like to sell out the next two Hogtown Oprys in May of this year and next. All proceeds after the Opry bills are paid would go directly to The Grand Finale and would determine how big that event would be. Make no mistake, on May 17, 2026, there will be a spectacle, but will we have a Noon to 5 p.m. celebration with a couple of bands or a blast that will stretch out late into the evening? Will there be sword-swallowers and fire-eaters and merrymakers arriving in clown cars? Will there be mariachis and loud explosions and doobie tosses and streakers running through the downtown streets, high on life and and/or psychedelic products? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.
That’s all for now, folks, but stay tuned.
