Ramón Sender Barayón

Ramón Sender Barayón is a central figure in the history of the greater Bay Area counterculture: electronic music pioneer, co-producer of the Trips Festival in San Francisco, consigliere and chief remembrancer of Morning Star and Wheeler Ranch open land communes. Born in Spain in 1934, he is a living link between the radical communal traditions [Spanish Anarchist Naturism] of the Old World through his father, the Spanish Anarchist novelist Ramon J. Sender, and the New World through his first wife Sibyl’s great-grandfather, John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the nineteenth century religious utopian Oneida Community. In exile from fascist Spain with his father and sister — as “citizens of the planet, without attachments... radical cosmopolitans,” Ramón grew up in New York, where he began his music studies (before continuing at the San Francisco Conservatory and Mills College). He first tasted communal living in his early twenties via the authoritarian communism of the Bruderhof, and went on to co-found the Digger commune, Morning Star Ranch, with Limeliter Lou Gottlieb. Edited from an introduction by Iain Boal in “West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California” (PM Press, 2011)