Joe often quips that he headed out west for the same reasons as Jojo in the Beatles song: “for some California grass.” But like most kids who landed in the San Francisco area during the late 1960s, he had very personal reasons for leaving his old life behind. In 1965, his college girlfriend was killed in a car accident just as they were starting to talk about marriage. Six months later, his mother died of cancer. “I really started to sink,” he says. “I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t find anything about school that would hold my attention for very long.”

So he dropped out of Emerson College and moved down from Boston to Manhattan, where he found work at a color lab in midtown. He spent his free time in Harlem, seeing James Brown and other R&B singers at the Apollo Theater, or in the rough alphabet streets of the East Village, hanging out in Andy Warhol’s orbit. He watched the Velvet Underground play at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, then went back to dilapidated apartments to snort meth. “What I was doing was grieving,” he says now. “But I was too young to understand that. All I knew was I was desperate to feel good again.”

In 1969, just after he got laid off from his job, his youngest brother, Frank, came to town. Frank had been living out in Berkeley, and he persuaded Joe to head back there with him. The drive took three or four days, almost all of it through dreary, frozen fields. They crashed on a floor somewhere in Ohio. In Wyoming, after they locked themselves out of their car, the local sheriff let them in, looked them over, and then told them never to come back to town. They crossed the Sierras during a blizzard, barely able to see the road. Eventually, they felt their car heading downhill instead of up.

“And then,” says Joe, “all of a sudden, we found ourselves in this lush valley. It looked like a first-grade primer. The hills were rolling and green, all soft and curved like the beautiful body of a young woman. The sky was perfectly blue. And the clouds were all puffy, you know? Pure and white and glowing. I almost wondered, ‘Did we run off the road and fall into paradise?’”

When they pulled into Berkeley, the hippies were everywhere—standing on every corner, lining every avenue. Joe had never seen anything like it. “People don’t really understand this now, but at that time, in most of the country, you couldn’t have long hair and not be in danger of being beaten up,” Joe explains. “In Boston, cars used to come screeching to a halt and guys would jump out and want to kill me. I’d have to run.” Even in New York, whenever he left Greenwich Village, “I was continually harassed, spit on, and shoved around.” And Joe wasn’t even really a hippie. “I was hip,” he says. “That meant boots, black jeans, a black t-shirt, a leather jacket—the kind of thing you’d maybe see the Rolling Stones wearing.”

In California, the flower-child style was at its apex. “People had really developed their individual looks,” he says. “They were no longer trying to figure out what being a hippie meant. I found that really stimulating. It made a great subject for a photographer—even though, by any middle-class standards, these people were living totally miserable lives.”