Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

Sleeping Where I Fall pays honest tribute to the spiritual search of a generation that had become morally estranged from the dominant culture, a generation that transformed the politics--then the heart and soul--of America.. Peter Coyotes compelling memoir traces the anarchic West Coast counterculture of the sixties and seventies through the political street theater of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the revolutionary economic theories of the Diggers, and the chaotic encampments of the extended Free Family of hippies and activists. Coyote offers blunt, affectionate, and often comic portraits of friends, lovers, and fellow travelers--all hell-bent on redefining what was morally permissible. Sleeping Where I Fall pays honest tribute to the spiritual search of a generation that had become morally estranged from the dominant culture, a generation that transformed the politics--then the heart and soul--of America. In this heartfelt and intelligent memoir, actor Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture--a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of the political street theater in San Francisco. Chronicling the revolutionary economic theories of the Diggers, and the chaotic encampments of the extended Free Family of hippies and activists, Coyote offers blunt, affectionate, and often comic portraits of friends, lovers, and fellow travelers.All hell-bent on redefining the morally permissible, these were people forging a new image of personal freedom, people whose ideals were tested by the extremities of communal living. Coyote recalls the world of the Haight-Ashbury, of communes named The Red House, Olema, and Black Bear Ranch, and of life on the road with a nomadic clan called the Gypsy Truckers. In prose that is graphic and unsentimental, Coyote also reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called free, the terror evoked by bikers who came on late-night visits looking for drugs, and Coyotes own quest for the next high. Coyotes road through revolution taught him to be a player and a strategist: he began as a radical communard and became chairman of the California Arts Council; he apprenticed in improvisational street theater and became a motion-picture star working with directors from Steven Spielberg and Barry Levinson to Pedro Almodvar and Roman Polanski. This memoir is his attempt to understand the road he forged, and the distance between the extremes in a spectacular life.