Location, Location, Location
When I first sit down to talk with my uncle, I immediately notice that he is wearing a Jerry Garcia shirt. Fitting, for both our conversation and his personality. Gilly has lived in LA almost all his life, and while 70 years of age may appear daunting to some, he doesn’t let it get him down, always quick-witted and full of energy. As our conversation meanders from Catholicism to Jimi Hendrix to Aspen Colorado, one thing becomes clearer: He really has done it all.
Gilly Roswell grew up in Hancock Park in Los Angeles. A descendant of the early Californian Del Valle family, he grew up with five siblings. He was raised a devout Catholic, which is why, he says, it is so interesting that he was involved in the counterculture of the 1960s. He attributes this in part to where he grew up: “My senior year, the sunset strip was hippie headquarters. When Buffalo Springfield is singing, ‘Something’s happening here…’ That was about the strip. You were aware of all of it.” And boy does he have some stories: Sneaking into Monterey, hustling the bouncer at the Hollywood Bowl, and even talking his way into being the stage manager at The Shrine.
“My sister and I were Irish twins, so we were born 11 months apart, but it felt like a generation,” he says, referring to the tumultuous years of 1967 and 68, during which all aforementioned antics took place. In one particular anecdote, he tells me that he actually saw the kitchen where Bobby Kennedy died: “When [he] was shot at the Ambassador, I rode my bike and went into the kitchen to look at it.”
For Gilly, seeing Quentin Tarantino’s newest film Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood brought him back to those formative years: “I know all those places. I know what the carnation truck was like, I knew Whiskey a Go-Go, I knew all that. It’s so weird to see it because he recreated Hollywood Boulevard exactly like it was.” Interestingly enough, he danced on Hullabaloo, the very same show Rick Dalton appears on.
This leads to the incredible story of him sneaking into the Monterey Pop Festival with his brother. Using the business cards they obtained from producers on Hullabaloo, they would attempt to pull a fast one on the security guards standing in front of the backstage entrance. While initially met with some skepticism, my uncle was able to sweet-talk his way in, arriving just in time to see Jimi Hendrix infamously set his guitar on fire.
By circumstance or skill, my uncle seems to have rubbed elbows with all aspects of the 60s. He went to UCLA Film School in the early 1970s, right as universities began protesting the war: “The student protests really started at Columbia, but it moved all over… It’s not necessarily that I was ‘in’ the counterculture or anti-war movement, but it was all around me. I was in the thick of it.”
That last part is the fascinating thing; Telling me these stories, it seems like he was an active participator in the hippie scene of the 60s and 70s. Yet, to him, someone who had lived through the era, he barely skirted the edges of it: “Was I participating? I suppose. Everybody was. But not at the level of a commune or anything like that.”
In Gilly’s mind, there is no question that the Vietnam War started it all: “People started to think, ‘What about our planet? What about our young men and women that are dying?’ By the end of ’68, we knew we were fucked. Fucked fucked fucked. Everybody wanted to do something at that point.” He calls this feeling a sort of “creepiness,” and he’s quick to draw parallels between the 1960s and today. “We’re getting there again,” he says, a look of disappointment on his face. That same fever pitch that his generation reached during the years of Vietnam, Martin Luther King, and Kent State, is something he sees my generation reaching with the environment and the immigration crisis. “You can’t just live and not think about these things, or you’re not doing what’s best for your future,” he says, somewhat prophetically addressing his youth while also addressing mine.
The idea of living in the moment and caring genuinely about your passions is something Gilly still carries with him today. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, he believes, “is truly the blessing of my life. I am 70. For me to be this old and still do the things I do is possible because of what I experienced in the 60s and 70s.”
“Be Here Now,” Gilly tells me, was the slogan of the time. After hearing all these stories, however, those three words feel more like instructions for a life well-lived, instructions which he follows to a T. Who knows what he’d be doing now if he had grown up in Middle America instead of Los Angeles? Not I. But one thing is for sure: He would not be who he is today without his experiences in the 1960s.
