Helms spent the rest of his youth in Missouri and Texas, where he learned to organize events by helping to stage benefits for civil-rights groups. He enrolled at the University of Texas and became part of the music scene there, a scene that included a very young and inexperienced Janis Joplin. Soon he dropped out of school and, inspired by the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to travel across America in search of freedom and inspiration, he set off wearing shoulder-length hair, beard and rimless glasses hitchhiking across the country. He ended up in San Francisco in 1962.