Growing up in San Rafael, David Perlis always sensed there was more to uncover about Marin—stories simmering just beneath the surface.
Driving past the houseboats in Sausalito, through the Calles of Stinson Beach or along the winding hills of Mt. Tamalpais, he had the same nagging feeling. “Even then, as a kid, I sensed there was another Marin,” he said. “It just always felt like I had just missed something.”
That curiosity only grew as he got older and left home. He kept running into mentions of Marin he could never quite place. “Could the Mill Valley in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums be the same Mill Valley he knew?” he wondered as he read the book in college. “Was ‘Snow in San Anselmo,’ the opening track on Van Morrison’s 1973 album, Hard Nose the Highway, written about the same town he’d grown up next to?”
As he kept collecting fragments of Marin’s cultural history, he found himself piecing together a story that never quite came into focus. “You get these little bits of story, but it’s hard to put them in order,” he noted. “I was curious whether they were all connected, and what was true and what wasn’t.”
When he went looking for the book that would connect it all, he came up empty handed. “I discovered that it remarkably didn’t exist,” he said. “And then it became my responsibility, my absolute honor, to take it on, and to write the book myself.” The project that would become his debut book, Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast, was born.
Over more than five years, Perlis combed through archives across the state, working through autobiographies, oral histories, contemporary interviews and—his favorite source—personal correspondence. But not all of the story lived in archives. Much of it was still living and breathing in Marin. And as the influential decades of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s slipped further into the past, it became clear that the window to capture those stories firsthand was closing.
“It was urgent that this be done,” he explained. Despite the rigor of the research, Perlis didn’t want the book to read like a historical tome. “I wanted it to read, even though it’s completely nonfiction, like a fairy tale,” he said. “I wanted it to have atmosphere. I wanted it to have suspense. I wanted you to fall in love with the characters and share in their hopes and dreams.”
What he found in his research surprised him. Marin’s cultural fingerprints weren’t confined to the Bay Area; its influence, it became increasingly clear, was national and even global. It started, in part, on a houseboat salon aboard the SS Vallejo in the Sausalito harbor, and ran through Gary Snyder’s cabin on Mt. Tam, a gathering place for Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and the rest of the Beats. It threaded through Van Morrison’s years in Fairfax, the paradigm-shifting influence of the Grateful Dead and the seismic impact of filmmakers like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.
“By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, the entire country was looking to Marin for inspiration,” Perlis noted. “It was looking at our traditions, and our rituals, and our heroes, and our myths. And ultimately, they were adopted by the entire country.”
As the threads multiplied, Perlis needed a word for what he was seeing—something closer to a cultural movement than a scene. He landed on the catchy term “Marinaissance.” “It’s insane how deep the Marinaissance runs,” he said. “The closer you look, the more you realize that everything you love is from Marin.”
A proud local, Perlis is unapologetic about giving Marin its due. “I think it’s time for Marin to stand up and take credit for all of this stuff,” he said. “I think San Francisco gets too much credit… I think there is now enough evidence that we can see the big picture, and we can see that Marin was really an important, essential, distinctive culture of its own.”
‘Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast’ is out in bookstores as of September and via heydaybooks.com.
