Wavy Gravy, the Clown Prince of Hippiedom, turns 80

The great walrus of a man in the tie-dyed lounge wear and the red clown nose rises from his onstage easy chair at a Sunday afternoon concert. An audience of 2,500, in their own tribute clown noses, silently waits as he steps ever so painfully to the microphone to rasp, “Never judge a cover by its book.” “I don’t walk so good right now, but I can still talk good,” Gravy says in an earlier interview at his home in Berkeley. Suffering ongoing back agony that six spinal surgeries could not cure, he keeps mainly to an office chair with wheels that he rolls around his bedroom. [...] he pulls himself out of that chair, down the rickety stairs and into a car for an hour-and-10-minute ride to an outdoor venue in Rohnert Park. “There is no human being quite like Wavy,” says Dorian Jones, who is there wearing a T-shirt with the concert logo “Wavy Gravy 75th Birthday” above a list of bands — Jackson Browne, Crosby & Nash — like any rock festival souvenir. People come to his birthday parties to support the cause and hear the bands, but they also come to hear the Wavy-isms — the most famous being his sunrise greeting at Woodstock, Good morning. What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000, listed by Entertainment Weekly as among most memorable entertainment lines of the 20th century. [...] there that he is the one who got the idea to put acid in the Kool-Aid and call it “electric,” giving author Tom Wolfe the title for his account of the psychedelic era in San Francisco. Among his best was the introduction he gave for a new act appearing at the Gaslight, the famed brick cellar in Greenwich Village. Romney came to California in 1962 at the request of comic Lenny Bruce, who promised to manage his stage career. [...] any hint of careerism was derailed when he came into contact with writer Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who operated out of La Honda in the Santa Cruz Mountains, traveling in an old school bus painted in Day-Glo colors and named “Furthur.” Romney, who always drank from the punch bowl for the tigers, came away from that scene with a selfless outlook that has carried him for 50 years. “I realized that when you get to the very bottom of the human soul where the nit is slamming into the grit and you are sinking, but you reach down to help somebody who is sinking worse than you are, then everyone gets high and you don’t even need LSD to do that,” he says. [...] Romney’s back was giving him trouble, the result of too many Vietnam War protests and “behaving stupidly and getting beat up a lot by the police and National Guard,” he says. [...] 44, Jordan Romney has two kids of his own among nine children who call Mr. and Mrs. Gravy their grandparents. Since 1979, the couple have operated out of a sprawling two-story Berkeley brown shingle a few blocks up Shattuck Avenue from Chez Panisse, a restaurant Mr. and Mrs. Gravy have been to only when someone else is paying. Gravy has a corner room marked by bumper stickers covering every inch of the door, like a college kid’s dorm room. The interior is stacked with enough of his trademark derby hats and logo T-shirts that Mrs. Gravy has decamped to her own bedroom across the hall. For 10 weeks at the camp in Laytonville (Mendocino County), he will put on silly costumes and play clown for kids of all ages, a quarter of whom come on scholarship. A disciple spreads giant bubbles overhead, as Gravy starts in with a story. On the day of his 80th birthday party, a Chronicle videographer met Wavy Gravy at home and went along for the ride.