Very early in the book, it was so very tempting to accuse the author of merely name dropping about his Herculean druggy glory days; touting others' achievements and success by associations. But I was soon dissuaded of this criticism. Well, maybe not about his pharmacopial prowess. Memories by nature are filled with anecdotes, and this reviewer merely scratches the surface of his book's generous and appropriate surfeit. And when you consider he was physically present when the Beat movement was morphing into the Hippie movement, his recollections are historically important, a necessary insider's point of view. The constant of travel endlessly energized the art, philosophy and politics of these two movements. There was opportunity and ability to simply pick up and leave one locale for another. Like Kerouac and Cassady, he knew it was all open road, and there was always somebody significant to warmly meet.

In the early years of the memoir, Hammond Guthrie as a writer and artist was yet unmanifested. At this point his interest in art was strict observation and absorption. He freely admits that during the early blossoming LA art/rock scene he was too absorbed in his own self-absorbed spirit quest and possessed no obvious skills other than ingesting death defying quantities of drugs. But Guthrie was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a multimedia artist, long before the expression became popular. His "happenings" in the sixties were events which combined poetry, music, art, film, dance, dress, health food and drugs; fueled and infused with Hippie philosophies borrowed, amped up, and expanded from their predecessors: the Beats, Surrealists and Existentialists. Guthrie's writing would be influenced by Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, Hemingway and Kerouac. His multimedia productions would combine jazz, painting, multi-layered film, spoken word, and various other musical/sound tracks.

For me, reading AsEverWas is akin to opening an exploding time capsule...