Brautigan, McClure, Rexroth, and Snyder at the Nourse Theatre, 1969

David Miller has been hard at work preserving the archives of the late photographer Clay Geerdes, and recently shared a set of photos from a performance by Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder on June 30, 1969.

According to Rexroth, in an interview with David Meltzer from San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, the event was a benefit for the Planning and Conservation League (PCL), and took place at the Nourse Theatre (now the Sydney Goldstein Theatre, and home to City Arts and Lectures). The PCL was started in 1965, in an effort to curtail the environmental destruction wrought by the surge of development in California at the time. The organization has since succeeded in preserving hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlands, beaches, and wildlife habitat.  

David Miller’s Clay Geerdes Archive contains a great many more historic photographs from around the Bay Area in the ’60s and ’70s, including shots from the Human Be-In, the People’s Park demonstrations, underground artists and publishers, musicians, and figures like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary.