In January of 1978 Carole Rae and I were driving in San Francisco. Carole wondered why something wasn’t being done about all the dead Christmas trees on the street corners.
I suggested we rent a large moving van, fill it with dead trees and burn them at Ocean Beach.
The next Saturday, Carole phoned our friends and invited them to the beach burn. My mother and one of my children filled up the rented truck with over 40 dead Christmas trees.
At the beach that night, there were 200 people, who unloaded the truck and built a pile of trees about 15 feet high. Somebody lit it and the flames were over 40 feet high. The crowd went wild, dancing around the fire and running into the ocean.
We did it for a second and third year. The second year the Park Service Police were standing next to the truck and gave me a $15 ticket for an unpermitted beach fire.
One of the attendees, a lawyer, Gary Near, demanded that I protest the ticket with his help. We did and the judge waived the fine but demanded that I not do it again.
I did it one more year but hid the truck immediately after unloading it. From that date on, San Franciscans have been burning their own family trees at the beach in January.
I may have gotten the idea for the tree burning from seeing a 30 foot high pole in a clearing in the forest near Kyoto during the Summer Obon Festival. The event had pine shavings on top of the pole which were lit by an arrow. The shavings fell off the platform like a burning waterfall.
One of my close friends, John Law, created his own version of my burn at the nearby China Beach. The overlap in people was largely the Cacaphony Society (Suicide Club at the time). John built The Man at the top out of neon; John’s profession is neon signs. Years later after again being banned, the fire was moved by John and Larry Harvey to the Nevada Desert for an August event known as Burning Man.
John has always given me credit for the event, as its grandfather. In many ways I am the grandfather to countless events in the San Francisco Bay area because the area is so fecund with artists, crazies and original people who only need a suggestion to do something original.