Zero to Sixties
By MikeMarino
Love, Haight, Poisoned Acid and the Bi-Sexual Looking Glass
In 1966 and ‘67 I was in Haight Ashbury living with a girl from Germany, Myrika a 23 year old artist who was a Mercedes Benz when it came to sex, and also my other love interest Olivia, a 15 year old American Lolita made in the USA runaway who had a Chrysler Hemi under her hood. I was almost 18 so that made me somewhat of a Metropolitan Convertible with room for three. The great thing was not just me being in love with both, but both of them also in love with me and the other one. It was a bond that was deep, spiritual and was the Crazy Glue that kept us bonded together as one. The newspapers referred to the whole scene as "Hippie Haven", (I’ve always hated that term “hippie”... most who used it or claimed to be ‘Hippies’ were not. Media term looking for headlines. It was however a psychedelic universe and San Francisco was the Sun that it revolved around. Thankfully the three of us had an apartment and we were well established at this point living in the infinite zen moment inadvertently capturing time and space as it happened that included a revolving door and the many parties we would have with friends and strays who would stay over crashed out as crash landed visitors from the Haight galaxy over time. One of the stranger castaways I met on the street and invited over was a guy who became my best friend at the time named Dave, or as he went by his street name, White Rabbit, a rogue at heart and a penchant for drugs to match my own. At the time I met Dave at Psyche Shop looking for music, there was poisoned acid going around the street and even the junkies were getting hotshots of smack mixed with Drano! The San Francisco Oracle had a headline, tongue in cheek, tongue in chic…”Once in every week, Drano in every vein.” I remember too when Art Linkletter’s (no friend to the counter culture of long hair and drugs) daughter jumped from a window to her death in New York. He was on a rant about the counterculture and what he too called Das Hippies and their drugs. The San Fran Oracle in true Haight fashion had the headline, “Hey Art, Kids do the Darnedest Things.” A take off on his old TV show title for those of you too young to remember Rin Tin Tin Does Lassie. and the Hardy Boys Do Nancy Drew. Back to Dave. I brought him to the apartment where the party was already going on and he offered free acid to the assembled rat pack. Someone said to me “What if it’s poison/” and of course Dave heard it and he heard my response. “Why would he do that?” Dave very calmly looked at all of us and said to me directly, “Perhaps it’s my trip!” The room panicked, I laughed...he delivered the line so expertly he could have headlined at Vegas. He was Lenny fucking Bruce and Mort Sahl’s bastard child! I dropped first to lead the way and soon after others did too as I was not writhing on the floor in a death grip. Dave and I became good friends after that (he had his own apartment with some others) until he was busted and spent 1 year in state prison for dealing weed and acid to a NARC. We also had a bizarre night at the the Big Brother/Joplin house at 1090 Page Street when we were with two runaways at a party in the basement when the Hells Angels had a beef with someone in the house. The night involved guns and cops who rushed to the scene. Dave and I were busy with our runaways when all hell broke loose and we managed to all crawl out the basement window into the backyard before the cops started to round people up. Two of the other standouts at our place was a 20 year old UCSF college student, Carol, as blonde as Myrika and a Liberal Arts Major. We met her in the Park on a weekend when Kites and People were flying high and after a little weed as we passed the imaginary Peace Pipe she too became a regular visitor. Mainly to see Myrika as both were tall and bi-Sexual, although Olivia and I were not out of bounds to her and Myrika. Myrika decided who and when as she was sort of de facto co- head of the house with me as she was older and wiser...and sexier! Carol was not of the street, as she too had her own place with roommates near the college. She always wore shorts and her shorts were short, revealing thighs of wonder, veritable bear traps, and Myrika took notice of that immediately. With Myrika it was women, two-somes, three-somes, it was sex, pure and simple, and not limited by the numbers of partners at any given or any one time. Three was NOT a crowd. She was an experimenter of superior Kama Sutra talents. The funny thing is I could be with other females, Olivia for example if Myrika was OK with it, but she rarely had other males except once with a young male runaway who was Olivia’s age. Everything was upside down! When Carol and Myrika began their affair it was a bi-sexual concerto of a hymen symphony. Both of them were vaginal virtuosos, well tuned while their sexual performances were standing room only for myself and Olivia. You might say, they got the most bang for the bi-sexual buck. It happens at certain times of the month when they gave off that heavenly scent of estrogen marking each other’s territory with their vaginal perfume Olivia and I most times would retire to the living room and get lost in our own sexual galaxy on the old mattress in the corner. Olivia was too young, but curious and a couple of times would engage in sexual Olympics with Myrika and myself otherwise it was just her and I. The three amigos! Olivia was more hetero, but did have curiosity about her and Myrika was an excellent instructor. The world was still a wonderland to Olivia, and Myrika was so gentle with her as was I. There were others in our orbit including the wife a noted artist in the Haight in her late ‘30s. I met her first and was pulled into her world at their Victorian where we’d have dinner, her husband, her and I, then get stoned, listen to music and take turns making love to her on the floor while Sgt Pepper taught the band to play. She was also a regular at our apartment and not long before she and Myrika, who had a voracious appetite, would locking lips and disappear into the bedroom behind a closed door. It was an era of Haight and Love….by free love it was never about the cost of love, but of the freedom of experimentation and discovery...the freedom to act on your emotions and attractions and no matter what it led it generally crossed the border of the vanilla world. Whatever Myrika, Olivia and I had it was a bond of love and passion. Nothing to be ashamed of in each others eyes. Nor were we alone. It was the Haight afterall, 1960’s and somebody spoke and we went into a dream…...
Road Kill & Eating Asphalt
It’s getting near that time of year, sounds like that time of the month when I have my asphalt period kicking asphalt and spending more time on the road at places on the compass away from my home base. In the past there have been a few things that today to me are amusin, but at the time some were straight from the mind of Rod Serling. None of these trips involve my periodic galactic space journeys to Saturn or Mars, real and imagined due to an altered state of mindlessness, although some terrestrial events did involve an altered state...you know...Better Living Through Chemistry. On one of my 60’s hitchhiking trips from San Francisco to Detroit and back again I found myself stranded and out of cash in Gary, Indiana at 6 PM or so. Ever been there? Picture Tim Burton meets the Silence of the Lambs, and if I wasn’t careful I’d end up in a pit with a deranged transvestite and a poodle named Precious. Nasty, ugly, mean looking streets. I was 17 and trying to get back to Michigan for some reason or other. Grandparents anniversary or something. I arrived in Gary with a back pack, a pair of sandals, torn jeans and a t-shirt with a surfer cross emblazoned on the front as though I would be Beach Blanket Bingo’ing with the buxom Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello on the shores of Lake Michigan. I roamed around the inner city looking for shelter or any sort. If a drag queen made me offer to be his bitch of the day to get off the streets I would have accepted! I tried the old faithful Catholic churches I came across...huge, old, massive Baroque castles of sin and forgiveness...besides they had large pews and I could sack on one or make camp in a confessional where I could sleep and rest and if I got lucky hear confessions and dish out some outrageous penance for the penitent. You know…”Bless you son, say 100 Our Fathers and 50 Hail Mary’s and two full rosary’s, light 12 votive candles, take two aspirin and call me in the morning and no jacking off for you for a month! Springing up the steps at St. Something or Other….the doors were LOCKED! Every church door was locked that I tried so decided, well...it’s getting dark and this is nasty looking part of town so I better find a park with some bushes to camp it up in, when a cop car pulls up with two cops demanding my I.D. which I did and told them my story about being stranded from my last ride...they smiled and put me in the backseat and drive me to one of those Jesus Saves Missions...they are in every large city and are the McDonalds of Missions everywhere, except no fries or happy meals. They take me in, introduce me to the pious church lady (isn’t that special) who is running the whole Jesus show and I get to eat a bowl of soup and then sit through a prayer meeting watching winos repent (until the next bottle of Thunderbird falls miraculously from the sky...what the hell? Oh well it was safe and warm until later when they put you in the flop section. I had an upper bunk bed and spent half the night with my one sandal in hand to use as a weapon to keep the old winos looking for boy sex at bay. I felt like the new girl at a Sinatra party! I stayed awake all night until dawn then made a hasty exit and got a ride near the freeway (I-p4) which would take me to Detroit. PS. My parents didn’t know I was coming..to be a surprise. As I popped out my thumb near the top of the on ramp an 18 wheeler slowed down and asked where I was headed. Detroit! He was heading to Mt. Clemens a city west and north of Detroit...I had it made. The driver was a youngish Black cat and he could tell by my hair and clothes that he could share his Mason jar full of uppers with me. Damn..I was in hog heaven..We were on speed and he’d blow the horn at any cars with girls we’d pass laughing his ass off as was I. After a few hours we came near the westside of the city where my parents lived now in Dearborn Heights, so when we came to the Telegraph Road off ramp he pulled off and we parted ways with a laugh, a bunch of thank you’s and even a couple of uppers he gave me for the rest of the trip. All I had do was hitch up to Ford Rd, maybe 5 miles then on Ford Rd to Evergreen, another 5 miles. A trip I will never forget but…..I avoid Gary, Indiana with the religious fervor of a snake handling southern Baptist at a tent revival where they speak in tongues….
Olivia: The Vixen of Vision
Before the Summer of Love in ‘67. I experienced the Summer of Olivia. When living the Haight, I’ve written about Myrika, one of the woman that have had a profound effect on me. Then there is Olivia who also shared the apartment with me and her, but Olivia was first. She who was a 15 years old runaway I met on the streets in June ‘66 and also a character in my newest book. I had just turned 18 Mike met Olivia on the street my second day in the Haight. She wanted a light for a cigarette and I being the gent that I am did my best Bogart to please this young Lauren Bacall. She was a runaway and scared and somehow felt secure with me and strangely, I with her. The bond was immediate. She had long brown hair, slender and eyes that could were pools of green that mesmerized me at all 5’ 3” of her. We spent the day exploring, places like Fishermen’s Wharf and decided that night to sleep on the beach at the marina behind large rocks where we wouldn't be noticed. Camping out in the city is no different than tossing a sleeping bag out in the forest. I had a sleeping bag and a mess kit, and there was plenty of kindling about for a small fire that wouldn't attract attention, or at least not a lot of it. So as the day headed for its demise, and the night would take over they set about setting up camp on the beach on the bay to watch the sunset set, the stars appear in the sky overhead one by one, and the city itself with its diamond lights coming on the darker it got, its own form of stars twinkling, then the dance of Aphrodite as the fog enveloped the city protectively at the end of the day. We made love that night our bodies and souls as one, enjoying the feel of each other and the musky sex scent of love making filled the air around us. She hadn’t had sex before so it was not hurried but slow and gentle, the way you would handle a vase from the Ming Dynasty in a museum. When we were done her performance in bed left me sexually spent, but damn, she from that night one left an indelible mark on my heart. She was innocence and wise beyond her years. She was to me a zen master who held the key to the mysteries of life. She was innocence. She was Haight Ashbury. San Francisco was a massive Victorian neighborhood. We were hypnotized by the colors of the window trim. Purple window trim and the door to one apartment was the really nice green, dark green that I like. The color was the color of Olivia's eyes set into the olive coloring of her skin. Her eyes were two large green pools to stare into and drown in. At once I was in love and there was no escape. This young innocent girl led me on a spiritual journey that had me gladly stepping through her looking glass spellbound in her world. Her smile and her gentle kisses were the chains that held me in place. Her musk the intoxicant I craved.Olivia was a fuel injected mixture of pure animal magnetism. She had a voracious appetite for sexual experimentation and we were never apart from each other. I wanted to protect her at all costs from the street..we created our own world. We became one orb floating through time and space. Hell all of the Haight was a haven for runaways.It was a foreplay foray into the promiscuous world of juvenile jailbait encounters of the third kind carnal carnival of this sweet sex dripping nymphette. We were both kids bohemians at heart. We would ride the bus from the Wharf where we would have lunch and just enjoying the city. The city had a scent and an air about it, no doubt about it, and we were drinking it in like two kids on a hot day downing ice cold Kool-aid. Then we’d hop a bus back to the apartment I finally managed to afford for us after a month at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. We spent our days and nights soaking up the Haight where we would after Myrika joined us in early ‘67 Oliva, Myrika see "luminaries" on the street and meet some of them, but not all. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Eric Burdon, Ashleigh Brilliant, along with the local bands playing at the Fillmore and in the park. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother, Country Joe, Santana and others. Hells Angels and Motorcycle Ritchies, coyotes named Peter, magic men, mad men, and mayhem. Runaways, speed freaks, LSD, mescaline, grass, lava lamps, patchouli incense, the Psychedelic Shoppe, Tracy Donuts, 1090 Page Street, the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, Park Station Cop Shop, mellow yellow, purple hazed and double dazed days dazed in a daze. There was free food, a free store, a free clinic, free sex, free love, free crash pads, and freedom period. The Family Dog was man's best friend, and Bill was no graham cracker. The park filled on Sunday's for music, bubbles, kites and drugs. Bare chested and bare breasted the young of the day were mere prey for vultures who would circle around on the periphery waiting to strike, but this was 1966. The crowds hadn't arrived yet, the so-called hippies as the newspapers called them.The street wasn't yet crowded with wannabe's and neverwillbe's as it ultimately would be in the summer of '67s. In 1966, the Haight was more communal and quiet with art mostly, and dope, lots of both. Musicians practiced in hidden Victorian apartments, artists painted and mimes acted out on the When I met Myrika, the German Viking as I called her, she was 23, I was 18 and Olivia all of 16. I fell in love with her as well and my heart was split equally. We had a wonderful relationship for that year. Olivia and Myrika would also experiment sexually which to me was the culmination of the strange bond that held the three of us together. Sex was a spiritual event whether it involved all three of us or just two. No jealousy, acceptance and a fusion that could not tear us apart. One trip we all went cross country in Myrika’s Metropolitan, which if you don’t know what what a Metropolitan is, imagine sardines in a can. We made it to New York and back on fumes for gas. We sold enough acid and weed in the Haight to finance part of the trip, the rest we got along the way after New York when we stopped in Detroit on our way back to the Haight to see my parents. I introduced the girls as just friends. They fed us, put us up for two nights and my parents enjoyed the girls chatter who were polite as can be and dad gave us $300 to make it back with the promise I pay it back someday...which I did 6 years later when I landed a radio job. Once back in the Haight we continued our lifestyle. Olivia I had managed to have her keep in touch with her parents at home by phone and letter. She found out her mother was extremely ill, (I think her parents made that up as a way to lure her back home) but she wanted to see her. I think the whole “freedom” away from home and school and friends got to her, so we arranged for her transportation and that night she and I spent the night together. She was crying and yes, I was too. We had something briefly that shone bright and hot like a meteor in the sky. The next day I put her on a Greyhound bus and watched her leave my life but not my heart . I managed to keep in touch with her for years (she eventually married an accountant and from what she told me a good man) and still have her love letters written in the Haight on the back of H/A postcards of the Psychedelic Shop, especially the one she wrote that morning and left. My daughter has them in the Marino archives and when she brought them over a few months back I forgot about it but when I came across it...my eyes got wet and I could barely speak.The memories came flooding back and once again I could taste her lips and smell her musk as if she were still in my arms...and realized she never left my heart or soul.
The Story of the Two and a Half Myrika’s
In the book, “Dark Side of the Sixties Moon” the character of Myrika is a composite of two and a half women, Two German’s and an American, who have left their mark on my life. The first one is actually named Myrika and was one my live in girlfriends in Haight Ashbury. Olivia, who was a 15 years old runaway and also a character in the new book was the other live in. Myrika was a tall blond Nordic type, 5’ 10” to my 5’ 6” and was 23 years old to my 17. who was a poet/writer and photographer. Very protective and provocative in her writings and her personality. She was a student at UC San Francisco, theater arts. She was supportive of me who at the time was a directionless high school dropout while she was aceing college We traveled a lot on the west coast and a few back east which I have used as the setting for a few chapters of “The Dark Side of the Sixties Moon including our trips to Death Valley and the commune in New Mexico. One trip we went cross country in a Metropolitan with another couple, which if you don’t know what what a Metropolitan is, imagine sardines in a can. We made it to New York and back on fumes for gas. We sold enough acid and weed in the Haight to finance part of the trip, the other couple were from Seattle and the girl had rich parents so they picked up the slack. Thank gawd for the rich ones! Dave, was the guy’s name and my best friend in the Haight. He eventually ended up in Chino for selling drugs and got busted in L.A. on one of his forays down there. His girlfriend was Mary who was another 15 year old runaway girl. Hell all of the Haight was a haven for runaways…. Olivia is also a character in the “Dark Side” book as well...Olivia, as the pregnant underage girlfriend of Joey another character. She was not pregnant in real life until much later as an adult. I kept in touch for years and still have her love letters written in the Haight on the back of H/A postcards of the Pscyhe Shop. It may sound strange to share two women, in effect, they were sharing me so in this age of “ME TOO” believe me I have no complaints...use me abuse me was me motto. The other half of the Myrika character is Sibyll Kalff a German artist and musician who I met at an art gallery in New York where she was the featured artist. One thing led to another, this was post Myrika and Olivia by the way…..Myrika was sent back to Germany being long overdue when her Visa had expired by 6 months….that event is also in the new book… Back to Sibyll...we collaborated on projects, my words, her art that she had published in German as Kalff-Marino Little Books. She also used some of my word rambles and put music to them with her ban in Berlin called the Horsecock Kids, an industrial punk pop band, she was the bass player and engineer. We were engaged at one point when she fell to schizophrenia and committed to a mental hospital in Munich by her parents when she traveled back there. We’d write every week and still made plans….she couldn’t leave Germany in her condition that gradually swallowed her whole...soon I was dealing with multiple personalities...but always Sibyll...she was a free spirit, we went on a few trips to the desert southwest when she was here... photographing and hiking and laughing...she called me the Blue Coyote as blue was her fave color and I’d howl like a coyote when on the trip...Hence the Blue Haiku project…. We resigned ourselves that we would never marry now...she was getting worse in the hospital. Although our plans to marry were many years ago both in our 30’s, she said I was always her Blue Coyote….last year I got word from her family….Sibyll died alone in her room......apparent overdose as life became too hard for her...I wrote as a tribute…”Night of the Berlin Schizophrenes” So when you read the new book, these are the women who inspired the characters….life is funny at times and other times a real bitch…..Hooowwwwlllllll!
The Off Ramp
The Off Ramp was a gathering place formed by Howard Rochford in 1966 in the Haight Ashbury District. He and his staff of volunteer counselors gave safe haven to runaways, drug addicts and others who haunted the Haight. He and helped put many a young person on the path to productivity and away from self destruction. Howard out of all the people I met, along with one of the volunteer counselors, John McCloud became not only close friends, but can honestly say, they saved my life from what Howard told me once was a choice between a mental institution or a coffin. He pulled no punches.. He was so effective that my parents would donate $2,000 dollars a year to the Off Ramp until it closed down.
He was the biggest influence in my life. The story begins in 1966 when I arrived in the Haight and got tired of sleeping in the bushes in Golden Gate Park. I was directed to the Off Ramp in the basement of Hamilton Church. He also helped AWOL soldiers and draft dodgers with legal help from a staff of volunteer lawyers and medical for those who needed it through the Free Clinic. Many runaways actually thanks to Howard returned home, teen mothers to be given medical care, in all over 500 young people were able to resolve problems that needed solving. Even some GI AWOL’s were allowed back in service with only minor punishment.
When we met he thought I was a real smart ass, which I suppose I was but we somehow liked each other and I got involved with the Off Ramp as resident scrounge for extra chairs, tables, coffee mugs, whatever I could get donated or found. I even go to do the artwork on the table tops along with Myrika my soul mate who was also a force that kept me balanced. We helped clean up, talk to new runaway kids when they came in to calm them down, gave out lists of crash pads to get off the street, told about the free feeds the Diggers put on in the Panhandle Park every day at 4:00 and took them to the free store at times to pick up second hand clothes and other needs they may have.
I was still not rehab’d and my drug use was a rampant as ever...I guess I overshot the off ramp so to speak, but was a normal state of mind for me that those who didn’t know me couldn’t really tell. John McCloud was the man volunteer counselor. He was also an artist, motorcycle buff and freelance photojournalist who took the pic of me selling underground newspapers on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. I also managed to corrupt him by getting him to take acid and smoke grass, which led to the infamous Big Sur/Death Valley trip with Myrika and his Berkeley babe in Johns VW bus for two weeks of acid, wine and camping and hiking. Somehow I managed to corrupt.
He was level headed though in his Thirties, more than me 18 and Myrika, 23, and later my other girlfriend, Oliva, 15. It wasn’t unusual to have two girlfriends living with you in the Haight. Actually, Oliva was 15 and a local but would stay with me and Myrika for a few days at a time then go home to her mom, (no dad) then after a few days, come back to join us. We had an apartment on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, second floor with bay windows, bathroom down the hall shared, kitchen in the back, shared whereas the apartment had one large living room (for our parties with numerous friends) and one bedroom with one mattress on the floor. Not exactly Trump Towers, but the bedroom was cozy for all three of us.
One day, Howard sat me down and asked what my life plans were. He never told you what to do, but made you think and respond. He never looked down on you and always listened. He even made a call to my parents and assured them I was OK and he was working on my drug use and tada..was a big help with the new kids coming in off the street...they could relate to me..and I could relate to them.
Sometimes some of the newer kids to the Haight, females were sexually abused and some of the males were beaten up usually by drunk sailors or GI’s hating long hairs, but came to the area to score some “free love”. I was cornered one night by two sailors, drunk and mouthy with remarks about my hair, etc down by the Pizza joint I would go to visit Papa Doc and some of the Hell’s Angels who hung there like Motorcycle Ritchie who lived near my apartment, the Angels house was half a block up Ashbury from my apartment and they lived across the street from the Grateful Dead house..my other neighbors. It wasn’t exactly Mr. Rogers Neighborhood but felt safe. The Angels obviously weren’t afraid of me and I gave them discounts on the acid and weed I was selling...Win Win. I had protection.
I began designing more chess tables for the Off Ramp, Myrika did the artwork on the walls, and it became a sort of second home. John McCloud had set up a talk session between me, Myrika and Howard with some sociology students at UC Davis who were studying the group dynamics of the Haight. It was great night of convo until midnight and then back to the Haight.,...ha..it was first time as high school dropout giving a college lecture...I wonder if that qualifies me for tenure?
In time in 1968 I left the Haight. Myrika and I before that did numerous trips cross country once to NYC and she eventually went back to Germany, Visa long ago expired. Olivia went back to school when we left and I still have the letter she wrote to me about our love...my daughter has it now as with all my letters over the years..I went into the army to clean up my drug habits...that was a joke in itself.
John McCloud died in 2001...Howard passed on in 1998. Somewhere up above I can see Howard and John opening the Pearly Gates to let the sinners in with the saints….I hope they’re still on Gate Patrol when I arrive and get on the Off Ramp of death….
. Zero to Sixties
The Age of Aquarius held forth the promise of Peace and Love. A street hooker hiking her skirt to show you a pay as you go paradise in a cheap hotel room with yellowed shades from too much smoke and bed sheets that have seen more than their share of sexual activity by nameless faceless johns and whores. All yours for a few bucks and the expenditure of fluids.
The Age of Aquarius was a new Utopia offered up to us as a virgin is stripped and sacrificed to appease some ghoulish tribal god or King Kong.. The decade turned on, tuned in and dropped out at a furious pedal to the metal high speed race going from Zero to Sixties on the drag strip of free love, drugs and revolution. In time, the peaceful revolution of Gandhi and King went from Jekyll to Hyde with the pipe bomb politics of the Weathermen. The music and peace of brotherhood and sisterhood of Woodstock pulled it's Phantom of the Opera mask aside and revealed the brutality of Altamont where Hells Angels descended as an unholy host to beat a concert goer to death with pool cues as Jumpin' Jack Jagger flashed about on stage, his sympathy for the devil. The Summer of Love ended with the Death of Hip and the runaways all went home to the Midwest from whence they came beat and spent, wondering, where the fuck was this Utopia? Where was the revolution? Who gave me crabs?
The Haight was not hate, at first, it was an illusion that became disoriented and disillusion followed. Love was rampant sex, nothing more. It was the Summer of Lust in reality, and there is really nothing wrong with that. Eventually the Sixties gave way to the Eighties and the Gay Nineties and AIDS (don't blame that on the Hippies!) We had syphilis and gonorrhea if we weren't careful, so be wise and rubberize amigo's it's matter of commonsense. The drugs of choice were LSD and Marijuana. The speed freaks and heroin addicts followed and were treated as lepers, as lepers they were. The harder drugs were frowned upon, any addiction was weakness, then as a shock, we found out after his death, Jerry Garcia, Mr. Hipster, Mr. LSD was a goddamn junkie for years. The Hypocrisy of the Haight came back like a full tilt boogie flashback.
The Gilded Age of the Hip was tarnished by the gunning down of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The Hippies were replaced by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and other Yippies of the Youth International Party. Meanwhile, the dogma laden Students for a Democratic Society didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, they saw it coming and it was Mark Rudd and his vandals that stole the pump handle and packed if full of explosives.
The music and musicians were gods to us. They played along to floating walls and light shows, inner space and altered states, fluctuating between reality and our own personal sense of what that reality should be. To some of us there actually were Plasticine Porters with Looking Glass Ties. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick each gave us hard-ons in different ways. We wanted to make love to Grace but deep down we wanted to fuck Janis.
Jimi Hendrix waa waa'd us with a Star Spangled Banner and Jim Morrison showed us the way and the means to break on through to the other side. Jimi, Janis and Jim, like Jim, Judy and Plato in Rebel Without a Cause, ran headlong towards their personal private cliffs in an act of self destruction and in a flash..it was over. They became T-Shirt worthy overnight.
Neighborhood Watch duties were assumed by groups such as The Black Panthers and The Diggers. The Panthers ran soup kitchens, and helped their communities stay alive in an age of racism. The pent up anger exploded in a rage. The streets exploded in a burn, baby, burn non-disco inferno. Panthers gunned down in their apartments and hunted like big political game by the ruling establishment of the times. Today, Bobby Seale, former Panther and Chicago 7 defendant, sells BBQ books, and no, it's not called Burn Baby Burn with Bobby Seale Barbeque! (Don't believe it check it out bobbyqueseale.com)
Angela Davis is a fixture in academia, and Eldridge Cleaver.(No relation to Wally or the Beaver) was a proponent of violent revolution died in 1998, spending his last days as a born again Christian and Republican!!! I don't know which is worse!
John Lennon...man of peace, man of non-violence. From Give Peace a Chance to Revolution ("If you want money for minds that hate, all I can tell you is buddy, you'll have to wait!) Was hounded by the United States Government for his activism. His voice for peace, non-violence. Can't have that in America, the government is too fond of waging war to bully smaller nations and siphon off it's youth to die needlessly in battle over oil and power and Wall Street. John kept up the good fight, beat them in fact until one day, walking up the steps to his apartment at the Dakota he was gunned down. The man of peace died a victim of the very violence he abhorred. So, this is Christmas..what have you done?
Legend of a Mind
To understand the Sixties you have to re-visit the Fifties. It wasn't all Eisenhower and Nixon and TV dinners and backyard bomb shelters. It was the breeding ground for the Free Speech movement personified by Mario Savio and Lenny Bruce waging war to protect the First Amendment on the campus and in the strip joints. "To Come is a Verb" Lenny told us with his Masked Man bravado. Mario and Lenny were the Batman and Robin of that movement that paid the price at the hands of a judicial system mired in the murky swamp of the pre-Enlightment era. They would if the system could have been burned at the stake as heretics and (I love this next word!) blasphemers! (Damn! I got to use it!)
Mario was persecuted by the FBI for his activism with the Berkeley Free Speech movement and beliefs in the right of all Americans to protest and to speak out against injustice. The FBI has always acted as the Land of Democracy's billy club to stifle free speech from before Mario and Martin Luther King. It appears our top cop shop is more Red KGB than Red, White and Blue USA. Mario died in 1996 haunted by Hooverian nightmares.
Lenny Bruce came before George Carlin, in fact Carlin was HIS protege, sorry twenty-somethings to burst your Carlin bubble, but before the Seven Dirty Words fell from the sky like meteors, Lenny had 50 dirty words. Carlin borrowed seven and never returned them to their rightful owner! Lenny was a junkie on a mission. There are volumes written on his arrests and court transcripts that would fill the entire Library of Congress. His routines are the Rosetta Stone of the Free Speech Movement. His routines were grenades and in the end, Lenny fell on it to get his point across. Ok, so I made is sound more glamorous than it was. He actually was sitting on a toilet shooting up and overdosed, fell crashing to the floor all geezed up and as they say...He died with a shit eating grin in 1966.
Father Flotski, Strip Joints and the Shit Eating Grin
Growing up in a decidedly left leaning liberal household, my parents hung out with the art crowd from the Detroit Institute of Arts theater department which exposed me to many "forward thinkers" and "free speechers" Television was a healthy diet of Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs and Jack Paar, all still idols today...but it was that record collection of theirs that fascinated me most. A vinyl garden of Stan Freberg, Moms Mabley, Red Fox, Rusty Warren, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, and bit and pieces of the holy grail of forbidden fruit...Lenny Bruce early recordings. No, my parents didn't know I was listening to these but combined with my friendship with neighbor Soupy Sales let to a wealth of comic material to practice with on m school mates during lunch hour in the parking lot of the catholic school grounds..how appropriate...I was now Father Flotski!
It was an education that carried me through the years on my own paths...Freberg and his "Dragonette" was a favorite but I was just as intrigued if not more so with Leonard Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce. Lenny was born in 1925 in Mineola, New York and became a front line warrior in the battle for free speech and has the arrests and convictions to prove it. He was also an American, and in 1942 at the age of 16 joined the navy and saw action at Anzio and other battles in North Africa. One night to relieve the monotony of waiting for action, he dressed in drag to entertain his shipmates..OK, they loved it, his commanding officer did not..at that point Lenny saw a way out..he kept dressing that way and admitted he had homosexual tendencies which eventually led to his discharge. (In an interview with Larry Gelbart, writer and producer of MASH, he patterned the Corporal Klinger character after Bruce's wartime antics..so when you see Jamie Farr dressed in Toledo drag...thank Lenny Bruce for this other memorable character)
After his discharge he made his way to New York playing dives and strip clubs as an MC and was quite the accomplished mimic, in fact he appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts show doing imitations of Cagney, Bogart and Robinson. Later as his "dirty" reputation was growing TV wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole...except for one man..Steve Allen who had him on his show...he was a power and the networks gave in...later Steve would also have Jack Kerouac on reading his works to Steve's accompaniment on piano!
He started playing bigger strip joints in NYC and tried his hand in California as well. His fame and infamy were paving the way to a cult following and small record deals but eventually his unreleased recorded material was put to a vinyl disc by a who's who of record industry heavyweights that included Frank Zappa and Phil Spector. Lenny created wonderful characters from Father Flotski to the Lone Ranger and even told us how to make our colored guests comfortable. My favorite story is from Lenny's autobiography where he relates the story of being at a liberal party in NYC with all the "free thinking white liberals" where one rotund business type approached him and said something to the effect, "I believe colored people should have the same rights as we do, but I'd never date a colored woman" to which Lenny replied..."Well, then you date Kate Smith and I'll try to get a date with Lena Horne!"
Lenny met and fell in love with stripper Honey Harlow in 1951 and got married and formed a double act and toured the west coast. The marriage brought to life their daughter Kitty in 1955 but sadly they got divorced in 1959. In addition to numerous drug and obscenity arrests there was the Brother Mathias Foundation fiasco in Miami. Lenny posed as a laundry man and stole priests garb from the bins and went on the street and knocking on doors to raise money for a leper colony. Before he was arrested as an imposter he had raised over $8,000 and sent $2,500 to a leper colony.
The big obscenity bust for use of the word "cocksucker" was in New York and the literati turned out brighter than the Northern Lights to speak on his behalf including Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Paul Krassner, Nat Hentoff, Susan Sontag and James Baldwin. A patron at the club objected to the word "cocksucker" and Lenny in court claimed.."the guy probably can't come!" He was convicted and sentenced to four months in a work house but released on bail pending appeal. He died before the appeal was heard and eventually overturned.
His life was a test of free speech...George Carlin in an interview said, "He was a comedian, he was an entertainer, but most of all he was a social commentator" tackling issues from race, religion, Jewishness and bigotry. Today’s comedians go out of their way to shock for the sake of shock..Lenny did it to prove a point and pave the way. When it comes to free speech thank Lenny and Mario Savio, who both paid the price for daring to defend the First Amendment!
While in California, Phil Spector produced a live concert of Lenny's and so did Bill Graham at the infamous Fillmore Auditorium but the curtain was about to come down and on August 3, 1966 Lenny was found dead of a drug overdose lying naked on his bathroom floor with syringes all around, empty vials and had what was described as "a shit eating grin" on his face.
The photos taken of the death scene were tragic...and before they could bet to the press and frenzied media..Phil Spector made arrangements and bought the photos and negatives to keep them from appearing in the newspapers. The funeral too was low key but Phil Spector organized a public memorial, even taking out ads to invite the public and advising them to "bring a box lunch!"
Lenny’s legacy of free speech lives on in comedians today who are still influenced by the man who taught us how to “talk dirty and influence people” He is part and parcel of pop culture...he's one of the chosen on the Sgt. Pepper album cover and in Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 o'clock News” piece...there is the report of Lenny’s death., the real death of hip.
But the final eulogy was in Playboy Magazine in a final farewell article by Dick Schapp (Yes...THAT Dick Schapp). He said "One final four letter word for Lenny Bruce..DEAD at forty..now that's obscene!"
Jumpin' Jack Kerouac, the dharmabum who gave us and regaled us with tales of the open road and gave the Beat Generation a face much as Allen Ginsberg gave it a "howling" voice was the Kit Carson of the Rucksack Revolution. Marijuana, cheap wine, San Francisco's North Beach and the glitter and litter of the beat literati. A whole generation coming of age in the Sixties picked up a copy of on the road, and hit the road at the same time....from the past of the east to the future of the west. There were few apartments in Haight Ashbury that didn't brandish the Kerouac sword in the form of a ratty tattered copy of "On the Road." ( I still have mine!) Jack eventually died of alcoholism, and by the way, never travelled across country as the driver but always as a passenger with Neal Cassidy at the wheel..a man Ken Kesey called "The Fastest Man on Earth" as Cassidy also drove Keseys Magic Bus, Further across country for the prankster acid laden high jinx. Cassidy is central figure in numerous Kerouac books, while Kerouac in effect is merely and observer.
As the Sixties came of age, the youth of America sought their way to Jacks place in Lowell, Mass. hoping for a glimpse, a word, a look from this Buddha in plaid. Jack was not the old Jack anymore and there are instances where he would charge out on the porch and screamed, at least to one person who documented their visit, "Get the hell out of here. Go find your own heroes!" Not very Dharma like Mr. K. Jack died in 1969, but not before turning into an arch conservative Republican and became friends with that stalwart righty, William Buckley, Jr.(no relation to Tim)
Then there was Kesey. Ken Kesey, Merry Prankster and the man who gave literary birth to the Chief and R. P. McMurphy among others. His was the Sixties life legends are made of. The Psychedelic Bus and cross country trip, the marijuana bust at the Mexican Border, Sixties icons from Jerry Garcia to Hunter Thompson were orbs in his gravitational center. After the Sixties had waned...Ken kept to his principals and lived by them until the day he died, much as Hunter did, and Country Joe MacDonald and Hugh Romney do to this day on the Terra Firma among the living. They never wavered in their beliefs, so, maybe not all was lost in the Sixties.
The songs went from "Feed Your Head" to "Timothy Leary's Dead"...The Psychedelic Sixties were, lets say colorful. Purple Double Domes mixed with Orange Wedge, Tie-dyed denizens by the thousands thronged liquid light shows at venues across the land..and it all began in Millbrook, New York by a man who was leary of the world he perceived around him on a daily basis. He was really leary, no, I mean that he was really Leary..Timothy Leary. He psychedelic proselytizer who turned on and dropped out and led the journey for many of us..then in a flash he was gone. He took his final trip in 1996 and while wasting away in bed filmed his final words as he faded away and died. He soon joined his friend Gene Roddenberry in cremated comradeship and together were shot into space, the final frontier, and today remains a Legend of the Mind.
The Grassy Bowl Conspiracy
Sex...Drugs...Rock n' Roll!
The left over baggy of the seeds and stems of Haight Ashbury's purple haze daze, and the tie-dyed Summer of Love have long since gone up in smoke. It was a dimebag time of rolling papers, roach clips, and badda-bing, badda-bong pipes. Tim Leary, the High Priest of The United Psychedelic States of America, told us it was hightime to turn on, tune in and drop out. If you had some spare time, along with your spare change, you could also Kick Out The Jams, Brothers and Sisters! Pot, protest and politics, combined to create a strange menage a' trois of bedfellows, and the cast of cannabis characters is the stuff of killer weed legend.
Hemp, Hemp, Hooray!
Marijuana, mayhem and the movies were a magical mixture created in the soul kitchen of Hollyweed that manufactured recipes for some classic celluloid cannabis cinema. The semi-fabulous freak brothers, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider" took us for a gas and grass two-wheeled shotgun roadtrip through the deep fried, deep south world of southern fried brutality and hospitality. It became the counter cultures roadmap through Mainstream America where the asphalt highways and byways were laced with acid, weed, necks of red and loads of buckshot.
In the film "Alice B. Toklas", Alice wasn't just the Baroness of Brownies of her day, but a hemp happy Martha Stewart. "The Magic Christian" with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, had one of the characters, Lawrence Faggot (Fah-go!) tossing "damn hemp cigarettes" aside in disgust! The teen-angel badass, bad-angst full throttle afterburner of the Fab Fifties, gave us a full kilo of delightfully delirious and slightly deranged delinquent doper dramas. Hot Rods, hot chicks and marijuana sticks collided in a tangled wreck of highspeed and high weed.
All of these films owe their potency to a 1930's pot "high" camp classic silver screen smoke dream marijuana machine called "Reefer Madness". This is the proposterously hilariaous propaganda classic that dared tell the pulp fiction truth. and nothing but the truth about...Marijuana! The Killer Drug!! Marijuana! The Assassin of Youth! One puff leads to murder, rape, insanity and a one way straight jacketed ticket to ride to the looney bin aboard the Lobotomy Express! This film is the good golly Miss Molly great ganja grandaddy of them all. Released in the mid-1930's as a church film decrying the inherently evil properties of the killer weed and it's dilaterious effects on all decent citizenry of the Republic. It was originally released with the title "Tell Your Children". After a brief run it was purchased by Dwain Esper, a maestro of the exploitation genre,, who took his meat cleaver and hacked out scenes with the skill of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, inserted new ones, added graphic violence and sex, a brilliant, overacted touch of insanity and a demented piano player and voila! The refeer recipe for success and madness!
After it's uninhibited run in the Prohibition Thirties (the social experiment that gave rise to Organized Crime!) it ended up in storage and forgotten until 1971, when Kieth Stroup, founer of NORML bought a public domain copy for under 300 bucks. The print was cleaned up, the film re-released primarily to college campus audiences, and it became an instant hit. A cannabis midnight cowboy movie to be savored by stoned audiences who cheered wildly at every scene tossing sobriety out the theater doors!
Marijuana is still with us, and so is the prodigal cinematic child of pot parentage, "Reefer Madness". The original film is still available in it's original black and white incarnate form, as well as a new colorized lava lampoon version. The just to prove that people are strange production was a 2005 release of "Reefer Madness: The Musical" a show tune belter that was exhaled and released after a roach clip run on Off-Broadway. Theres No Business, Like Dope Business!
Julius Ceaser was a rank amateur when it came to ruling a vast empire. Nero was no hero either, and I Claudius had to make way for I Cannabis. In the powerplay annals of history and conquest, kingdoms, kings and conquerors, there are only two who can measure up to the tokin' task of total and absolute rule. Cheech & Chong...The Crowned Heads of the Holy Rollin' Empire!
California born Cheech Marin and Canadian Tommy Chong emerged as the Laurel and Hardy of the Reefer Revolution. Lighting up the radio dial in 1971 with their first album, and it wouldn't be long until the big screen went 'Up In Smoke" in 1978. Over the years they have remained as the Stoner Poster Children of the counter culture and have taken their rightful place in the Hemp Hall of Fame and Infamy.
Cheech met Chong in a comedy club in Vancouver in the post-Woodstock year of 1970. Chong formerly was a musician with Canadian rock bands, eh, and decided to take a stab at comedy, and when the hemp plant planets were in perfect alignment Tommy traded in his Maple Leaf for the Green Leaf and a pairing of historic proportions was conceived. The act was a hit and they decided then to hit road with their act. "Up In Smoke" was the dynamic doobie duo's big screen debut and featured this oddball couple as Anthony "Man" Stoner and Pedro de Pacas. Produced by none other than Lou Adler it also featured Strother Martin of Cool Hand Luke fame ("What we have here is a failure to communicate!") and Edie Adams, Mrs. Ernie Kovacs as Tommy Chongs Mom & Dad! Tommy, Man Stoner, gets kicked out of the house and heads for the ocean where he meets son of a beach Cheech in his Chick-Mobile and from there on it's horsepower, joint jokes and homegrown fun...as they try to keep one toke over the borderline, (driving a van made of marijuana from Mexico to the United States) from Sgt. Stedenko of the DEA, played to bumbling perfection by Stacy Keach.
Eventually, in a pop premonition of the low spark of high heeled leather boys in "Rocky Horror Picture Show", the Bong Boys end up on stage at LA's Roxy Theater with a fetchingly attired Cheech in a garish pink tutu and Tommy dressed as a giant red quaalude! The times, they may have changed, but the lude dudes are still scoring big on the streets with continued sales of those vintage albums and cult classic movies. The best part is, they only seem to get better with age.
If smart bombs and Black Hawk helicopters fill the Pentagons battlefields to overflowing with the tools of war, then rolling papers, waterpipes, lava lamps and bongs are the weedy weapons of choice in the head shop arsenals of the United Altered States of America. Getting bombed on bongs, stoned on joints and getting as high as a caterpiller on hookahs is as American as red, white and blue napalm and the cache of nuclear stars and stripes weaponry of mass destruction at our disposal.
Rolling papers have been a staple since they first appeared in 1854 on a European battlefield! It was during the Crimean War and the Battle of Sevastopol that a French Zoave soldier broke his claypipe in the heatful exchange with the Russkis. Claypipes were the vehicle of choice for smoking tobacco in those times, so in order to enjoy his daily smoke he simple tore some paper from his gun powder bag, folded it, placed a line of tobacco in it and rolled his own. The idea caught on with others and the rest is hempstory!
This new way of smoking wasn't just confined to the battlefields, and seemed to catch on back in the toney town of Gay Paree. In 1894, two enterprising brothers, Maurice and Jacques Braunstein, developed and patented a unique process of interweaving cigarette rolling papers. The process was called, simply, zig-zagging and the company became the legendary Zig Zag Company. Zig Zag Papers were such a hit, that they took the Gold Medal honors in 1900 at the Universal Exposition in Paris. So, whatever became of that soave Zoave of fancy France? Next time you pull out your Zags to roll a Godzilla sized doobie, look at the logo. Yep, thats him. High times have immortalized his Royal Reefer Headness and he's been helping us all to ride high as a kite for over a century.
The lava flow of the Vesuvian Sixties didn't race down a Mediterranean mountainside. Instead, it flowed through the inner mind with heat and hot sexy colors performing their ballet of bubbles. The original liquid in motion lights, as they were called, was the brainchild of a native of Singapore, named Craven Walker who called his first light, The Astro Lite! A Roswellian name to be sure to light the path for the invasion of the UFO's of the Flower Power Ganja Galaxy to come!
During WWII Walker was a pilot with the RAF fighting the flying metal of Messerschmidts during the Battle of Britain. As the world tried to put the pieces of the political puzzle back together after the fall of Berlin and atomizing of Hiroshima, Walker went about his tinkering and by 1963 light up London with the first loads of lava lamps. The lamp lit up one of the trade shows in Germany and two marketing suit and tie types bought the US light rights to the little Astro. In 1965 the first marketing eruption occured as the innaguaral light was sold in the United States. The psychedelic lava flow had begun. Craven Walker died in London at the age of 82 in 2000 and once said of his little light, "If you don't like lava lamps, you don't like sex either!"
The weed seeds of the counter culture of the spare change Sixites were planted a long time ago in a compost pile of history that goes back thousands of years. The early American Colonists were no stranger to cannabis and we can trace the nations hemp lineage from Washington and Jefferson to Cheech and Chong!
Hemp, Hemp, Hooray!
Free Speech Movement: The Savio Salvo
Mario Savio fired the first free speech salvo over the heads of straight America from a verbal cannon on a California campus. Youbetcha...that was the Savio salvo heard 'round the world. That one particular speech galvanized a generation in much the same way as the Howling Ginsberg or the road weary Kerouac did in the era of the Beat Generation, but, few know about this prophetic proselytizer who charged into the free speech battle on the front lines with an arsenal of verbal grenades, along with Mario in the trenches, though on different battlefronts facing off with the "enemy" were the likes of Lenny Bruce, who proclaimed to one and all that "to" is a prepostion, "come" is a verb.
Mario hit the spotlight, center stage in an era that America found itself beginning to shed it's conservative Fab Fifties paranoia of the Red Scare, and the baby boomers were coming of age. The old paranoia's were being transferred from the parents fear of the Red..to the childrens fear of it's own Red, White and Blue. Bob Dylan was blowing folk music magic dust in the wind and Lenny Bruce was a schtick up artist playing bawdy rimshot tits and ass shows in burlesque houses from the Sunset Strip to North Beach in San Francisco. Mort Sahl was urbane, and fired with a single shot to hit it's sociological target while Lenny Bruce used a shotgun blast of profanity to test the limits of endurance..in the end..Sahl was mortified!
Retro backstep to 1958, student activists organized SLATE, a campus political party, to promote the right of student groups to support off-campus issues. In the fall of 1964, student activists who had traveled with the Freedom Riders and worked to register African American voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer project, set up information tables on campus and were soliciting donations for civil rights causes. According to existing rules on campus at the time, fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs.The yin and yang of the continuing failure of the American two party system to function for the people, of the people and by the people of the land of the Red, White and Screwed. This was further proof of that ongoing malfunction.
There was also the residual air of Red Scare Big Brotherism, as a mandatory loyalty oath was required of the campus faculty, which had led to dismissals and ongoing controversy over academic freedom. (Loyalty to the government to me is treason, loyalty to the "people" is democracy!) In September of 1964, Dean Katherine Towle announced that existing university regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues would be strictly enforced. This particular piece of real estate was until then thought to be city property, not campus property.
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a direct result of all these new restrictive and somewhat facist impositions and exploded into a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 on the Berkeley campu under an informal leadership of a body of activist students. In protests unprecedented at the time, students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.The runaway free speech train was on a non-stop collision course and there was no turning back at this juncture.
Stepping into the spotlight was "true believer" -Mario Savio. Mario was the blue collar son of a Sicilian steel worker, born in New York in 1942. Within 22 years his voice would not only lead a generational movement but his would be the voice that opened the floodgates on an entire body electric called "the free speech movement" letting loose the wild verbal mustangs as they broke out of the corral of formality in Berkeley in 1964. His podium could be everything from the steps of Sproul Hall on campus to the rooftop of police car. It was an age ripe to rip from it's face the phantoms mask that disguised the "odious operation of the machine!" He was raised a devout Catholic with all it's cathedrals and holy catheters. Mario was involved in the early Civil Rights movement and eventually ended up at Berkeley. Although his activism was activated in the deep south during the era of the fight for civil rights, his super nova protest exploded on the Berkeley campus in October 1964 when former studen Jack Weinberg was manning a table for CORE. The university cops put Weinberg in a cop car when someone from the surrounding crowd yelled out..."sit down", and Savio along with others began a 32 hour sit in..that's when he hopped atop a cop car and worked the crowd into a frenzy with his speech. But it was December of that year that launched the first real Savio Salvo heard round the world.
That volley was the "Bodies upon the gears" speech to 4,000 assembled on campus..which led to the arrest of Mario and 800 others where Mario proclaimed.."There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." The Free Speech Movement was now full tilt boogie. Eventually in 1965 Mario quit the FSM as he was disappointed with the growing gab between the leadership of the FSM and the students themselves.
America..democracy...free speech for all... yeah right, no left..yeah, left..it's a reality alright, for all, except those who truly have a voice and can make a loud and clear impact and stir the emotions and jumpstart activism. This country does not mind one iota if you are a mental deficient and can't speak in whole sentences, like most newspaper readers and journalists, but .... but...if you have a voice, a real voice that scream from deep within the well that is you, well, well, if that is you, the FBI is not far behind you waiting for you to bend over before they pounce and gang rape your rights. Forget about soap on a rope in the jailhouse shower your fair game and tasty meat. Savio was "summoned" to the FBI Berkeley office after he had quit FSM. They claimed they had threatening letters that were directed to Mario, but in true Hooverian melodrama refused to speak while Mario's attorney was present. Mario instead criticised the FBI for failure to make arrests and take action in the deep fried southern south where human rights were being violated everyday. The meeting ended faster than early ejaculation.
Mario, was a highly passionate and educated individual who held a variety of jobs. Not all requiring the brain of a rocket scientist. Marriage was in the cards for Mario as well, in 1965 when he married a free speech movement activista and they both bid adieu to Americo, doffing their sombreros to the ghost of Woody Guthrie, and off they went to Jolly Old England. Mario, it seems had won a scholarship to Oxford. While in England, the Savio's had a son, Stefan, but, things were starting to fall apart for Mario as emotional problems began to surface from the bottom of his pysche's ocean floor, and exact a toll on him. By 1966 the Savio's en masse moved back to the Left Coast and the Peoples Republic of Berkeley. By 1968, Mario got all mainstream politically and decided to run for state senator from Alameda County on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, but, lost to one of those pesky wimpy liberal democrats that always screw the skew for die hard activists by diluting the message and cater to the centrists. It's the political equivilent of watering a guys drink down in a bar and charging him full price.
The Free Speech Movement had long-lasting effects, sort of a radical left westie hangover after boys night out on the Berkeley campus and left it's indelible marks as a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement in America. It was seen as the beginning of the student activism that existed on the campus in the 1960s, and continues to a much lesser degree today..much lesser today, non-existent!. Everything that goes up, however, must come down, or, for every action, there is a reaction. The reaction this time was a substantial voter backlash against the players involved in the Free Speech Movement. Ronald Reagan, yep, that one, won an unexpected victory in the fall of 1966 and was elected Governor...to the left that was akin to snapping a wet towel against some naked jocks ass in the locker room. Ray-Guns first order of the day was to direct the UC Board of Regents to dismiss UC President Clark Kerr because of the perception that he had been too soft on the protesters. The FBI had kept a secret file on Kerr. Hell, they probably have one on you two. If so, be proud! Besides I don't trust many people who haven't spent time in jail.
Mario, in 1980, decided to return to the ivy vined towers of tweed, wool and academia at the university at San Francisco State, four years later he received a summa cum laude lawdy lawdy miss clawdy degree in physics and snagged his masters in 1989, and then moved to Sonoma County where he taught mathematics, philosophy and logic at Sonoma state university.
Paranoia strikes deep as the song goes, and sometimes, most times in this so called democracy of ours it is a justifiable fear that creates a wall of resistance to this "land is not your land", "this land is not my land,"America. The purple mountain majesty, is stripped and found not to be so majestic at all but loathesome. In the case of Mario, it was eventually revealed as the 20th Century was coming to a close, that Savio had been trailed, tailed, spied and lied about by the FBI. This ghost shadowing began the moment he had climbed on to the police car that harbored Jack Weinberg on that Berkeley campus in 1964. It was at this point that the wing tipped depraved departmental mental minions of J. Edgar Hoover were salivating over Savio in an effort to bring in an orchestrated movement of anti-Savio salvation to the nation. If only Mario were homosexual, he would have been better off. Hoover would have overlooked his politics, in fact, would probably have invited him to bed in the Rotunda, or at least engaged in a rousing round of odious machine masturbation of Savio's speeches.
Mario was followed for more than a decade because he had emerged as the nation’s most prominent student leader.There was no evidence that he was a threat or that he had any connection with the Communist Party, but the FBI decided he merited their attention because they thought he could inspire students to rebel. Dammit America, someone has to lead and this country hasn't had any leadership from the White House in years, and yes, that includes the "mighty" Great White Hope, Barack Obama, who has decided to let Bill Clinton run the country in his absense.
Mario was on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's illegal counterintelligence program ivestigation finally ended at the beginning of 1975 and at that point an investigation into the FBI’s abuse of power began. Savio’s ex-wife, Suzanne Goldberg, said that the "FBI’s investigation of her and Savio was, a waste of money and an invasion of privacy."
Mario time card was about to be punched. He had a history of a weak heart and after a life of high octane visibility it began to wear hime down. He was admitted to the hospital in Sebastopol on Nov. 2, 1996 where he slipped into a coma on November 5, and he died the following day after being removed from life support. The voice of a generation was silenced and the odious machine still grinds away to this day, but not without some modification thanks to Mario Savio, Lenny Bruce and other advocates of Free Speech in America. Remember to celebrate true democracy..it's alright, and legal to burn the American flag..what better way to celebrate a legacy.
The Savio legacy lives on on the campus at Berkeley. The Sproul Steps which was the proletarian pulpit of student activism in the Sixties are referred to as The Mario Savio Steps, and grab a latte laddie and lassies, The Free Speech Movement Cafe is open and the walls are covered with murals depicting the times, feeling and mood of the revolutionary Sixties and the Berkeley Campus..ground zero for Free Speech and the battleground where the first Savio Salvo was fired in a free speech shot heard around the world. They also serve soup and sandwiches and most foods are organic, what else would you expect?
More Than One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
The Spare Change Sixties came on like a dayglo banshee, screaming and screeching. The counter culture was on the move to the beat of a communication breakdown with the torch passing greatest generation that won the war to end all wars. Now it was the Emperor without any clothes as the Military Industrial nation stood naked in a pool of hypocrisy and the new generation, moved like so many ants across the asphalt expanse of America. The East Village to Haight Ashbury, east coast to the west, the neighborhoods were psychedelic bi-coastal sexual bookends anchored in fog and smoke enshrouded harbors. The ragtag army traveled by thumb, by car and V-dub vans.
Male hormones were reaching critical mass, while teen aged girls were having menstruation melt downs. The Sexual Revolution was on. It was a time of Yellow Submarines and magic carpet rides, the straights and the Haights, the difference itself was as divided as night and day-glo. The acid poured like rain from a monsoon in New Mexico painting a kaleidescopic portrait on a blank canvas in double domes of purple to alter the states of the alter ego's.
The hipsters of the '50's and the Hippies of the '60s shared common heroes from Kerouac to Ghandi, and shared their heroes personal quests of civil disobidience and public drunkeness. It was a tightrope walk of cultures that met and morphed into a wonderful bastard child of pop counter culture that included the likes of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the famous Trips Festival. It was determined at one point that it was time to load up the sociological bus, inhale deeply and take a whole generation on a magical journey aboard a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus named "Further".
Flash forward to that period in time on the cosmic stopwatch later. Flashback now to a time in a space inhabited by the duo that would one day converge in a merry-go-round of Albert Hoffman and Ken Kesey, proving that more than one flew over the psychedelicatessan of a cuckoo's nest. Dr. Albert Hoffman was the first man in space, and is best known as the Father of LSD. Born in Baden, Switzerland in 1906 he studied chemistry in Zurich. His main focus of study was the chemistry of plants and animals. He landed a gig at the famed Sandoz Labs in Basel studying medicinal plants and ergot as part of a program to to purify and synthesize active constituents for use as pharmaceuticals.In his studies he first managed to synthesize LDS in November of 1938 while researching lysergic acid derivitives. It's main purpose was to be a circulatory stimulant. It was put on the back burner for five years until 1943 when he decided to re-examine it. He accidentally absorbed a small quantity through his fingertips and became the first outer spaced traveler fueled by LDS.He hopped on his bicycle and the rest is hipster history.
He later wrote about that ride..."I was affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away." That day is remembered by the faithful as "Bicycle Day"
A few days later he purposely took 250 ugs of LSD and experienced a more intense trip. Self experiments continued by Hoffman and a gang of happy colleagues. Later Hoffman went on a hallucinogenic treasure hunt studying the substances found in Mexican Mushrooms and other plants used by aboriginal peoples. This study eventually led to the synthesis of psilocybin, the active incredient in many magic mushrooms. He also studied Mexican morning glories and found the active ingredient in on variety was chemically similar to LSD. He died in April 2008.
Author Aldous Huxley opened the literary doors of perception, while Jim Morrison, a young film student and poet in southern California broke on through to the other side of that door with a blazing poetic fire that lit the imagination of a generation. Huxley had always been fascinated by spiritualism, philosophy and psychedelics. In New Mexico where I used to live, the saying was, "Don't search for the peyote, the peyote will find you!" Leave it to an inquisitive German pharmacologist, who studied and then published the first study of the chemical properties of the cactus in 1886. The wild west was winding down and the study of psychedelic properties was on the rise and raising the levels of self awareness. Peyote to the primitive religions and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of long standing. In some cases it was more than that, for example in the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity."
Huxley was tripping out in the sterility of the 1950's and from those experiences wrote the book, "The Doors of Perception" a phrase used by William Blake that sufficiently influenced Huxley to use it as the title to his book regarding his mescaline experiences.
If Hoffman gave birth to LSD, and Huxley put the psychedelic experience into literary perspective, then Jim Morrison, gave the chemical offsprings it's lyrical and poetic voice through music. Jim was attending film school in Los Angeles, a budding director to follow in the celluloid footsteps of the great ones. The actors, the directors, the writers, the artists..all creative types you follow the muse wherever she may lead. Another young film student, Ray Manzarek was working on projects with Jim, and the realized at one point the shared an interest in music. Jims poetry was put to a blues piano by Ray. They teamed up eventually with Robbie Kreiger and John Densmore. The band chose its name from the very same poet-visionary William Blake, who had written, "When the doors of perception are cleansed, things will appear to man as they truly are...infinite." Another inspiration was the Huxley book, "The Doors of Perception". Morrison was so connected to both works that he proposed the name, The Doors. Everyone agreed that the name, as well as the inspiration from which it sprang, was perfect to convey who they were and clearly representative for what they stood for.
LSD was sanctifed to a higher level by the high priest of the Garden of Chemical Eden, Timothy Leary, and one man, and many pranksters, took it even further, to a chemical roadshow that ate asphalt from the psychedelic colors of the west coast to the grey east of New York City and it's teeming tenements and lofts of the East Village. Timothy Leary was the high priest of LSD, turning on, tuning in, and dropping out while dropping acid by the bucketful.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters flew over the cuckoo's nest of the tie-dyed decade by buying an old school bus and loading it up with cargoe, contraband and contraptions including musical instruments, speakers, electronics, bong pipes and other necessities of such a journey from one coast to the other. Ken's first novel, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" was a success and in 1964 Ken and Company were ready to celebrate the publication of "Sometimes a Great Notion" with a cross country chemical mission of conquest. The old school bus was painted in brilliant flourescents with a variety of symbols, some mystic, some fun, but when viewed collectively, pure haiku. The bus was named "Further" in honor of it's ultimate destination, and at the helm was Captain Kesey, but in the drivers seat was non other than Ken Keseys real life JP McMurphy and Jack Kerouac's real live Dean Moriarity, Neal Cassidy, gearjamming across the black jazz asphalt night of the continent, and all the while loudspeakers were blaring and the Pranksters pranking their way across America in a journey that would become the subject matter of Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Although Kesey is generally associated with Northern California and the robust northwest state of loggers, Oregon, his roots are deep in the soil of the ag-rich community where he was born in La Junta, Colorado.
Located in southeastern Colorado, La Junta is located on the Arkansas River and lies on the old Santa Fe Trail. Ken was surrounded at an early age by dairy cows and devoted his young days to farm work where his work ethic was ingrained. By the late 1940's the Kesey Clan packed up and made it's way to Springfield, Oregon where in school, Kesey found a passion for wrestling in high school and college. He enjoyed reading, and on the quirky side of the street, ventriloquism and hypnotism.
Finally the pen became mightier than the sedative when Cuckoo's nest was published in 1962. First adapated as a stage play, and eventually as the cinematic icon it eventually became in 1975, although Ken loathed the film version. Whether it was a financial rift in the fault line or the fact that the main character was the McMurphy one and not the Chief as in the book, Ken left the production within two weeks. Also Ken wanted Gene Hackman in the McMurphy role, and not Nicholson. (Stephen King had the same problem with "The Shining" and wanted another actor in Nicholsons place! Gimme a break, Nicholson gave life to both characters that the celluloid gods demanded. It's one thing to write a book, another to produce a film. Let both artists stay in their own realm and let the other do their work.
The inspiration for Nest was a stint at a veterans hospital where Ken worked. The patients were under the influence of hallucinogenics as well as sedation, which made Ken wonder were they kept in that state because they didn't fit the societal mold or some other reason to shunt them aside in a landfill of insanity.
In 1959 the military industrial complex was involved in experimental testing of psychoactive drugs and their reactions from those who ingested. Some of the offerings today read like a Charlie Sheen buffet menu of all you can eat chemistry. LSD, psilocybn, mescaline, cocaine and on and on. Ken, like Hoffman before, wrote extensively about the effects of these drugs. Soon, Ken moved from Menlo Park where he was working a the time, thanks to the sucess of the book and moved to La Honda, California, a beautiful two lane wooded region south of San Francisco so rustic that the redwoods word plaid shirts in lieu of bark. His fame grew, his circle of friends grew and not unusual to befriend and entertain on regular occassions, the Grateful Dead, Kens favorite band, and Allen Ginsberg. The partiers were accelerated with black lights, strobes, day-glo paints, and loads and loads of LDS, the holy communion of the unholy commune. Tom Wolfe wrote magnificently about the parties and the trips in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a weathered copy I still have to this day...
The Trips Festival and the Bus that could go further...or Furthur, it was a schizoid hipster suppository and repository of iconic proportions, and like the times, not easy to digest the meaning at one seating at the table at the feast without getting history heartburn trying to make sense of it all. It was time for publication for public consumption, Kesey's next literary foray, "Sometimes a Great Notion." It was time to party and take the road trip of lifetime aboard a bus called Further or Furthur with a noble cast of counter culture characters as the trip of celebrate "Notion" was about to accost the nation, west coast to east, North Beach and the Haight meet the East Village head-on in a psychedelic collison, replete with colorful clothing, blaring speakers atop the magic bus, and a load of Merry Pranksters to Kesey's Robin Hood aboard the 1929 dustbowl era International Harvester...bound for glory..or at least Times Square.
In literary lore Neal Cassidy holds a place on a pedestal of hipster honor in the realm of all things Kerouac. He was the true beat, while Jack wrote about the beats, his inspiration was the sum total of one man..Neal, or as he is known, "the fastest man on earth" and the official Further captain of the gear jammin' journey across an America that had not witnessed such a cornucopia of flotsom and jetsom of debauchery, drugs and the off-beat fading Beats, now becoming Hip as the times they were a changin' group of hepcats heading east, not west as is often the Kerouac case, the counter culture compass was pointing to the Atlantic this time, not Pacific. "Further" as painted on the bus as a one word poem-destination placard to placate the psychedelic trailblazers on their Jeremiah Johnson quest as modern day asphalt mountain men and mountain women and Mountain Girl...
Tripping out at the Trips Festival which was a trip in and of itself held in the dawning month of January in 1966. In part it was the idea of Steward Brand, Prankster and in a later life the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue. It was organized by Pranksters and kept in reign by none other than "Filmore" Bill Graham.
It was a night of techno-frenzy, with decible decadence provided by the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other neighborhood bands. Entertainment was provided by the spectators themselves, the bands, and LSD was plentiful thanks to the Mother Theresa of acid, Owsley Stanley himself who passed it around freely, a cherubic smile beaming from his face.
The times moved on, the Summer of Love had a broken heart and fell apart as Flower Power wilted in the garden. Ken kept active at his farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon with his family, including son Zane who keeps the Kesey flame alive today along with a host of aging Pranksters hanging on from the old days, and some new ones to help light the way for the new days. Further was put to the psychedelic pasture in an empty field in 1989 when Ken acquired a new bus...it wasn't the same at all...as the orginal Furthur could go no further. The second bus, also called Further is a 1947 International Harvester.
Ken passed away in Oregon following an operation for liver cancer and died at the age of 66 in November 2001...and no, he was no space oddity, he was just one who was lucky enough to fly over the cuckoo's nest in time and make the best of those times.
At the Kesey website in the Intrepid Trips store you can purchase miniature toy school buses hand painted by the Pranksters, perhas Zane himself. I have one sent to me years ago when I had known Ken, and fortunate that my bus was painted by Ken himself...it sits by my keyboard, so when I get a bout of writers block, it reminds me to keep going..just a little further....
This Machine Kills Fascists (Folk You!)
Folk music in the Sixties were laced with doses of lyrical protest. The Eve of Destruction dawned across the land, you know, the land that is my land, your land, made for you and me. In the Fifties, it was the Beat Generation that held up the poetic mirror to modern society, as modern as the space age Fifties could be. Post war prosperity and victory brought the fear of cold war annihilation and a generation of disenfranchised American's were "beat" as far down as society could push them. Folk music blended with poetry in the coffeehouse circuit of the East Village in New York to North Beach in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg was howling his ass off as the voice of a new generation, Kerouac documented it with a typewriter, and folk music was making statements with music and lyrics. Tame at first in the Fifties, by the Sixties, the merely pleasing vocal harmonies of folk groups were changing, they were coming of age and the new riders of the purple rage were riding the range.
As the Sixties dawned and German Shepard Police Dogs and municipal fire hoses were keeping drinking fountains white only, and diners, segregation was about to ignite and explode into an inferno consuming a dividing a nation. James Meredith, young school girls victims of racist bombings of schools and churches, three young college students from the north who came to register black voters were found in an earthen embankment, and a mother from Detroit found murdered for daring to come south and volunteer for civil liberties. This does not count the hundreds of locals who were beaten, jailed, hung or shot.
The bards and the poets of peace, love and understanding were on the march for civil rights in the south, American involvement in Vietnam, ban the bomb and nix the nukes. Womens Liberation was in full bloom and bra's were burned joining the raging bonfire of draft cards and American flags. Bare breasts could now show off their purple mountains majesty from sea to shining sea from B Cups to D Cups.
Along with the marchers, came the writers of protest such as Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Phil Ochs, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and so many others including some guy you may have heard of from Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan along with a young man named Guthrie..Arlo Guthrie. However, long before Arlo came flying into Los Angeles, carryin; a couple of keys, and Bob Dylan answered the question that had been blowing in the wind, there was another earlier wind, the winds of the Dust bowl Thirties, where folk music took a left turn and Woody Guthrie was bound for glory with a guitar and a pocketful of songs about poverty, socialism, and injustice..his messages were clear and concise, and it was simple and displayed on his guitar in bold letters...."This Machine Kills Fascists!"
Woody had traveled the country and saw and experienced first hand the hardships plaguing American citizens. The dust bowl had caused an upheaval in society and the great migration from the heartland to the promised land of California was underway. Route 66 was the Highway of Immigrants as Steinbeck called it, and it was fate that brought Guthrie and Steinbeck into a close orbit where their friendship would form a deadly duo of that would rip the facade of capitalism away to reveal the poverty of a nation. Woody would play at Socialist and Communist functions throughout California, although he never registered as a Communist, at least no records indicate it.
In addition to singing, he was also recorded by Alan Lomax and had his won radio show, as well as writing a column for the Daily Worker. In 1940 he played at the Farm Workers Aid Benefit put on by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers..long before Willie Nelson got into the fray. It was at this concert that Guthrie met Pete Seeger...a legendary paring that would inspire the future giants of folk from Ramblin Jack Elliot and Phil Ochs to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez along with countless others.
As for groups, the Mugwumps emerged from the gray streets of the East Village in New York. It was small club folk ensemble that included Cass Elliot, Denny Doherty who both later would become one half of the Mama's and Papa's after they discovered California Dreamin. One member Zal Yanovsky who with a friend and fellow folkie and sometimes Mugwump, John Sebstian both believed in magic, would form The Lovin' Spoonful. Listen to the song Creeque Alley by the Mama's and the Papa's you'll hear the musical journey of Cass and Denny's transition from Mugwump to Mom and Pop. Included along the Creeque Alley journey are good friends Roger McQuinn of Byrds fame and Barry McGuire who penned and sang Eve of Destruction.(McQuinn and McGuire, just a gettin' higher in LA you know where that's at..and no ones getting fat except Mama Cass.)
The stage was set...the music was about to turn further left and take it's message on the road to the people as the folk scene grew more militant. It was time for a change, because as we now know and some of us did know then..the times were a'changin' , the generations were split like the atom at the Trinity Site and parents were told in no uncertain terms, "You're sons and your daughters are beyond your command." Bottle of Wine & A Jewish Cowboy from Brooklyn If the Fities were sociologically antiseptic with Madison Ave. ring-a-ding ding martini lunches, Leave it to Beaver and consumerism cranked on overload, the Sixties were by comparison a plain brown bag holding a cheap bottle of wine that spilled out onto the streets of the south as the Civil Rights movement went on the march..no turning back...the point of no return had been crossed. In Greenwich Village in hard concrete gray New York, folkies were sounding the alarm through thought provoking lyrics set against an accoustic background. The scene was exploding as the Beat Generation began to take up the battle cry. The Village gave birth to a prolific folk scene that included notables from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Phil Ochs. Although Bob Dylan has achieved the most reknown, it was Tom Paxton that jump started the whole shebang. According to Dave Von Ronk, "Bobby was the most visible standard bearer of folk, but Tom really was it's founder."
Tom, hit the scene in the early '60s and began writing songs of protest that eventually included "Bottle of Wine" and "The Ballad of Spiro Agnew" which later the lyrics were changed to "The Ballad of George W." In 1964, three young civil rights workers from the north were Ko'd by the Klan in the south, and Paxtons ballad "Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney" is still haunting today. Tom also put his guitar where it counted. He led a group of fellow travelers and fellow folkies to play for and lend support the striking coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky.
Tom moved to England years ago, but kept active all these years garnering award after award to this day, but the biggest honor for any musician of folk is to have had the impact that he did on society and it's thinking and the folk movement in general. As a musician in general, having a guitar line named after you is better than a cheap bottle of wine. In 2004 the Martin Guitar Company introduced the Tom Paxton Signature Edition acoustic guitar in his honor.
Then along came the Folk Music Cowboy, Ramblin' Jack Elliot. Born in Brooklyn, where most young kids wanted to grow up to be gangsters, Jack wanted to be a cowboy after sitting in the stands at many a rodeo at Madison Square Garden. Forget the Knicks. Shit kickin' cowboys were busting bronco's and busting balls in the arena and young Jack got caught up in frenzy. So, like any cowboy to be he left home at 15 and hooked up with a travleing rodeo and it was there he was influenced by a rodeo clown who wrote songs and poetry and played guitar. The die was cast and Jack was on the Santa Fe Trail blazing a path to the folk scene of New York.
He taught himself guitar and eventually me Woody Gutherie and stay awhile with him learning to master the guitar and to write songs of social relevance. In an interview with Arlo Guthrie he stated that he was too young when his father died to really know him and it was Ramblin' Jack that taught Arlo his fathers sons and style. Curiously he was not only a father figure to Arlo, but mistaken many times as the father of Bob Dylan! Interestingly enough, Bob who was heavily influenced by Ramblin' Jack also wrote songs that Jack covered in concert. He would precede the song with "This song was written by my son, Bob Dylan." Arlo and Bob can thank the fates that they had a "father" in Ramblin' Jack Elliot. You Can't Jail the Revolution: The Chicago 8 The Democratic National Convention of '68 was a lesson in the horrifying lines of demarcation, the thin thread that separates a Police State from a Peoples Democracy. The Elections of '68 in and of themselves were a farce, a frightening drama unfolding eventually between two nominees from both parties, that were not even in the category of strange bedfellows. Democrat Hubert Humphrey had an irritating voice that largely worked against him. Nasal and high pitched he sounded more like Truman Capote going into labor. On the other side of the two faced political coin of the realm was Republican Richard Nixon. Never trust a politician with a perennial five o'clock shadow and the jowls of a rabid bulldog. The only viable candidate it seems was an actual pig, called Pigasus nominated by Phil Ochs and nomination accepted by Jerry Rubin. This "peoples" nomination took place during the riots and both Ochs and Rubin, along with the pig were arrested by Mayor Daley's goon squad in blue on an obscure still on the books livestock ordinance violation! Ok, too many police pig puns I can get drowned in here..Pig Puns..Pig Pen..see?
This civics lesson of democracy eventually exploded for five days with the Chicago police rioting with billy clubs and batons, brute force all in the haze of a tear gas that floated in an ethereal manner, a dreamlike fog that burns and brings reality to a crashing halt. The cops rampaged beating everything in sight including journalists covering the appalling events that would make Syria's president proud. Journalists cameras were smashed, film confiscated, and heads busted. Even Dan Rather was the victim of brutality on the convention floor and writer Terry Southern ran for cover into an apartment building head bleeding from wounds sustained as a journalist/observer.
The counter convention of the people was planned by many factions of the American Left but the clown prince's were the Youth International Party or Yippees along with the SDS. Eventually the riots culminated in more blood flowing than Lake Michigan and the subsequent trial of the Chicago 8 began. in March after grand jury after grand jury were convened and eventually indictments were handed down. At the time even Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General said they shouldn't press charges as it was clearly a police riot..and this from the nations top cop. It went to trial anyway and indicted were Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Black Panther Bobby Seale.(Bobby was severed from the trial for unruly behavior and contempt of court. The Trial then was of the Chicago 7.) Listen to the lyrics of Graham Nash's song, "Chicago" where he says, "So your brothers bound and gagged, and tied up to a chair."
There were also eight police charged with violation of civil liberties, and 16 unindicted co-conspirators. Defense counsel was made up of the dynamic duo of the Sixties Left, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass. The judge was Julius Hoffman, (Abbie Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Collins, Arlo Gutherie, Phil Ochs, Norman Mailer and Jesse Jackson to name a few.
Not having learned their lesson from the riots, Daley asked for help and called in the National Guard to ring the courthouse to maintain order from the crowds outside. Martial law had raised it's ugly head in a war torn Chicago. Let's face it the Nationl Guard are not well trained to "maintain" order if you remember the calm attitude they maintained themselves at Kent State. Give a kid a gun and a uniform and all bets are off when it comes to killing your fellow citizens. An American will do it as willingly as a Red Chinese at Tianamen Square. "We Were Under Orders" ...godamn, where have I heard that before...(for our next musical number, listen to Neal Young sing about the Tin Soldiers and Nixon Comin', Four Dead in Ohio")
The stage was set and the trial was about to get underway...only this time it was the American system of politics that was on trial against the backdrop of an unpopular war in Vietnam and asassinations in Memphis and Los Angeles. What did Zappa say? Oh yeah..It Can't Happen Here! Yippee's vs. Yuppies, Burn Baby Burn! By Mike Marino The trial of the Chicago 7 was a regular P.T. Barnum three ring circus of verbal sparring between the defendants and the crazy old judge. The court jesters of the revolution were in full flower and by the time the curtain was about to come down, the jury found them all "Not Guilty of Conspiracy" on February 18, 1970. It was a victory for free speech, but Judge Julius still had one small ace up his sleeve. and cited all the defendants for contempt of court, including their attorneys. Sentenced ranged from 2 and half months to four years. Froines and Weiner were acquitted completely while the remaining five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Each was fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. Abbie recommended that the judge try LSD and even offered to set him up with a dealer. In 1972 all the convictions were reversed by a Court of Appeals, and the Justice Department decided not to retry the case. The contempt charges were also overturned and the defendants all went into different directions as if a shot gun had blasted them into post-Revolution space.
Abbie Hoffman, the class clown and court jester of activism published Steal This Book in 1971, and many of us did just that, and bookstores then refused to carry it. (Why carry a book that would end up in someones oversized field jacket, as opposed to cash in the bank) Later he was arrested in 1973 on drug charges. He always claimed he was set up and the cocaine was planted, which was not an unusual police tactic at the time.. In 1974 he skipped bail and had cosmetic surgery that would have made Pricislla Presley jealous, and going underground once again, he hid for several years in plain sight in New York State under the name Barry Freed working on environmental campaigns. In 1980 he surrendered to authorities and recieved a one year sentence, but was released after four months.
His yellow jacket wasn't complete yet and in 1986 he was arrested again with others including Amy Carter, daughter of Jimmy Carter for his involvement in a protest against CIA recruitment on the Univesity of Massachussets campus.One of the witnesses for the defense was former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Hoffman along with the others were found not guilty. He appeared as himself in the Oliver Stone movie, Born on the Fourth of July, a film that was released 8 months after Hoffman's suicide in April of 1989. He regularly lectured audiences up until his death about the CIA's covert activities including assassinations disguised as suicides.
Then there was the Rubinesque Jerry Rubin. Political activist and author of the book Do It! made his left turn early in life and was involved in the planning of the March on the Pentagon along with Abbie Hoffman and another Chicago 7 defendant, David Dellinger where they tried to levitate the building but alas and alack, it would not budge, but the 82nd Airborne was on hand to prevent them from entering the building and although the Pentagon did not rise into the air, the rifle butts of the Airborne came down on protesters heads. After the Chicago Trial Rubin became quite the Yuppie businessman and was one of the early investors in Apple Computers.
In the 1980's, as the Batman and Robin of the "revolution" Rubin and Hoffman embarked on a debate tour of the U.S. called "Yippees vs. Yuppies" where Rubin proclaimed that the accumulation of wealth was the "real American revolution" and that activism was hard work and the abuse of drugs and sex made the counter culture a scary entity! You know, we are the people our parents warned us about!
He made a ton of cash runnng multi-level marketing schemes for health foods, and was eventually killed by a hit and run driver in front of his massive penthouse on Wilshire Boulevard in 1994, a fitting end to an activist turned capitalist, eh? Hopefully the vehicle that ran him down was a Mercedes, and not some cheap domestic car.
Then there is Barbeque'n Bobby Seale, who along with Huey Newton (Burn, Baby, Burn) was a co-founder of the Black Panther Party and the defendant in the original Chicago 8 Trial, who due to his belligerance, was severed from the trial and bound and gagged on orders of Judge Julius. He was sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court, and a contemptible court it was indeed.
In 1970, while in prison he was back in the courtroom for the New Haven Black Panther Trials. Panthers had allegedly murdered fellow Panhter Alex Rackley, who it turns out was a police informant. One of the Panthers turned states evidence and claimed the order to murder Rackley was given by Seale himself, the jury couldn't reach a verdict and the charges were dropped and Seale was released from prison in 1972.
He wrote a cookbook, Barbeque'n With Bobby, which is not exactly the Anarchists Cookbook, but bonafide tasty recipes for the carnivore in all of us and the proceeds go to various non-profit groups and social organizations, and was involved in advertising for Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.In 2006 he appeared in the film, The US vs John Lennon to talk about his close friendship with John Lennon. He's on Facebook today and who knows, there may be a cooking show in his future on the Home and Garden Television Network. Maybe the next cookbook will be called, "Fire Up The Grill, Burn, Baby, Burn!
Gimme an F! ..and it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for, don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam!
Country Joe MacDonald sang it loud and and sang it proud along with "300,000 of you fuckers out there!" The hook and seed of the song, "Gimme an F" was screamed at the counter culture crowd, crowded, and packed tight in true cannery row style at a whacked out Woodstock. An ocean away, sat Vietnam, a divided country by external forces beyond it's control,that was also ripping to shreds the social fabric of the United States. The counter culture was encountering clashes in the streets between riotious police in Chicago and street fighting baby boomer men and boomerette women...yip, yip, hoo-ray Yippies, with Jerry and Abbie acting as it's fulcrum. They, combined, were a lefty act of leftover vaudeville of guerilla political comedy, destined to fade into the dark nightime of changing times.
The Chicago Seven, Angela Davis, jet Black Panthers, wild and wooly Woodstock, hap, hap, hempy Haight Ashbury, and a plethora of psychedelics in the chemical rainbow of a multi-colored psychotropic of cancer ablaze with a hallucinagenic explosion caused by mushrooms, pills, tablets and crumbly weed and hashish for paper and pipe. Arlo was coming into Los Angeles carryin' a couple of keys, while numerous other Americans were heading north of the border carrying only a backpack, a pack of rolling papers and visions of a life free from war living under the maple leaf canopy of protection of the war resisters movement. Either way...we pleaded..."don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man.
Leviathan demonstrations to levitate the Pentagon, which led to the demise of the short lived garden of Hedon spawned by the tender loving care of love and peace of the Flower Power Generation would be trampled underfoot and suffer from Flower Power Degeneration as Kent State added four more dead in Ohio to the body count, (as though 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese) weren't enough to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an addict addicted to a sense of false democracy with war machinations. Democracy is a noble movement, but as practiced in America, it's a diluted illusion of freedom, similar to taking pure grade heroin and cutting it to dilute it's potency in order to stretch the softer product in a futher effort to increase volumn and thus, street profits. Uncle Sam is the proverbial school yard pusher of low grade democracy to countries who don't want it. Dick Gregory, Black activist and comedian stated in the Sixties regarding Vietnam.."Shit, I don't know why we have to shove democracy down the Vietnamese throat at the point of a bayonet. In my old neighborhood, if something was THAT good, we'd steal it!"
The B-52's in the Sixties weren't just some damned mindless band on the radio, and napalm was not a froo froo drink on the veranda in a tropical paradise. Hell..the Sixties were on fire with anti-war sentiment and all some of us wanted to do was avoid the draft, go up country, jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. Some of us had those options, the Vietnamese did not. It was their country being told to bend over and take it in the ass. Hell where could they go to get away, and did they want to?
The answer to the last part is no! The Vietnamese are not only one of the most effective guerilla fighting forces on the planet but with a long history of unrest and revolution, they are some of the most resiliant as well. The "Vietnam Problem" didn't start with Dwight David Eisenhower, the golfing goofbag of Presidents, nor John F. Kennedy, the male whore of American history. The "problem", for the Vietnamese began over two thousand years ago, under the ruling thumb of a dynasty far, far away, and eventually ended with a victorious kick in the American red, white and screwed balls. Black and blue and all we have to show for it is untold buried dead of our young and a lousy wall with names of the not so grateful dead etched for eternity or not, which ever comes first. How do those t-shirts read? Oh yeah, "I went to Vietnam and all I got was this lousy T-shirt and a body bag!" As the song goes.."be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.." Today we are more enlightened and forward thinking with Iraq and Afghanistan.."now your wife, mother or sister can also come home in a box" Thank Gawd for liberation and equality, eh? Vietnam is an egomanical stain on the American conscience of a nation not used to loosing, a school yard bully that got it's ass kicked for once. It's never recovered it's national pride. America was born of revolution over 200 years ago, and the resultiant overthrow of an occupying force. Vietnams history goes back much further as revolution was fomented against a phalanx of formidable foes.
I will dispense with an in depth look at American involvement..that has been done to death on the History Channel, we know what happened, we know we got our ass kicked. Case closed. Move on, and now into the time machine we go for some information that may help understand the voracious determination of these Asian peoples, who believe me, if I had to go to war, I'd want them on my side!
Two-thousand and five hundred years ago, Vietnam was under Chinese control for over a thousand years. They regained independence in the early 10th Century, and complete autonomy after another century had passed. By the 19th century, the land was ripe for picking again for foreign intervention by one or another Imperialistic powers. This time the brass ring was won by France in 1854. This lasted into the 20th Century until WWII, you know, the big one, when those madcap Rape of Nanking Let's Bomb Pearl Harbor Japanese occupied what is today Vietnam.
Once hostilities had ceased, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong version of George Washington, creates the National Liberation Committee of Vietnam to form a provisional government. Japan, dow broken and beaten, transfers all power to Ho's Vietminh. Ho declares independence of Vietnam, and wouldn't you know it, like a bad stage play, here come those bloody Brit redcoats as British forces land in Saigon to help return authority to the French. (Never mind that Ghandi was kicking Brit butt in the bid for Indian independence!) Also in 1945, the first American blood is shed, in Vietnam, when Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey, head of American OSS mission, was killed by Vietminh troops while driving a jeep to the airport. Reports later indicated that his death was due to a case of mistaken identity. He had been mistaken for a Frenchman. Now France got a colonial hard-on to re-exert it's power and influence over the tiny nation, and opted to go for colonial rule, only now, the rules had changed and there was no room anymore for fancy pants France!
One year after the world war had ended, the French and Vietminh reach an accord. France recognizes Vietnam as a "free state" within the French Union.Negotiations Between France and the Vietminh breakdown like an old car on the open road, and the Indochina War begins. Following months of steadily deteriorating relations, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam launches its first attack against the French. A force of 40,000 heavily armed Vietminh lay seige to the French garrison at Dienbienphu. Using Chinese artillery to shell the airstrip, the Vietminh make it impossible for French supplies to arrive by air. It soon becomes clear that the French have met their match.
It is also important to note that Ho Chi Minh had contacted Harry Truman in 1949 for recognition, as he also did to Dwight Eisenhower when he was president. Both declined to respond. Much as what happened in Cuba when Castro took over. Both countries looked to the "free world" for support and were refused. This country has a habit of creating it's own "enemies" so it has someone to fight to take the American people's minds off of real problems here at home such as poverty, unemployment, unafforadable health care, etc. The American government is the grand Illusionist when it comes to hiding it's own dirt in plain sight.(This is also the same country that backed Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden!)
Meanwhile, the French, well they got phucked at Dien Bien Phu in 1953, and once more outside forces prevail as the Geneva accords determined that the country be partitioned into two separate entities,the north and the south. During the cold war the north of course supported by China and the USSR (after non response from the west!) while the south was supported by the United States. This eventually burst into flames and not only gave birth to a new nation, but later some really great films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now.."God, I love the smell of napalm in the morning." In 1960's there was a cornucopia of campus teach ins, Veterans stage anti-war rallies, including those from WWII and the Korean war stage a protest rally in New York City. Discharge and separation papers are burned in protest of US involvement in Vietnam.
The Civil Rights movement joined in the refrain as CORE cites "Burden On Minorities and Poor" in Vietnam, where The Congress of Racial Equality issues a report claiming that the US military draft places "a heavy discriminatory burden on minority groups and the poor." The group also calls for a withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam. Martin Luther King speaks out against the war, calling the US "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," Martin Luther King also encourages draft evasion and suggests a merger between antiwar and civil rights groups.
Secret negotiations and peace talks finally start to take place in Paris and stagger on for many agonizing years as the body count grows faster than a New York Taxi meter can add up the miles.
Then turn the clock to 1973..the reality check is complete. It's over. The last remaining American troops withdraw from Vietnam as President Nixon declares "the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come." America's longest war, and its first defeat, thus concludes. During 15 years of military involvement, over 2 million Americans served in Vietnam with 500,000 seeing actual combat. 47,244 were killed in action, including 8000 airmen. There were 10,446 non-combat deaths. 153,329 were seriously wounded, including 10,000 amputees. Over 2400 American POWs/MIAs were unaccounted for as of 1973.
In 1975 South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh delivers an unconditional surrender to the Communists in the early hours of April 30. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin accepts the surrender and assures Minh that, "...Only the Americans have been beaten. If you are patriots, consider this a moment of joy." As the few remaining Americans evacuate Saigon, the last two US servicemen to die in Vietnam are killed when their helicopter crashes. Today, Vietnam has become a tourist destination. French, Brits and yes, even Americans make the trip and trek post Tet. It's a land today still of rice paddies, ocean beaches and palm trees. The smells of foods and spices permeate the landscape and the open air markets, as the memories and the stench of Napalm and burning monks recedes from memory and fades into a distant past. "Kick out the jams, Motherfuckers!"
That was the purple-hazed, double-dazed battle hymn of the 1960's. The Late Great Altered States of America. The Red, White and Screwed. It was an era that ripped the bra off of Lady Liberty to reveal her falsies and hypocripsy. Meanwhile, "Kick out the Jams" was resonating from deep within the bowels of the Motor City from the stage of the Grande Ballroom. It echoed throughout the concrete canyons of a youthful hipster America. The Grande, for those who may not know it, is to rock n' roll what the tomb of Jesus is to christians, except a much cooler and louder place!. It was a great time to be alive, stoned and crazy.
It was a musio-politico warning shot fired over the head of a disheveled establishment. The tattered flag that represented a faded American dream was emerging from the chaotic mushroom cloud of Flower Power. The Sixties brought about the assasination of two Kennedy's and a King, not to mention a law and order police meltdown during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. Vietnam was a raging drunken bulldyke in a baddass biker bar on too many bennies and dexies, and with too much to prove. The Black Panthers and Angela Davis had "gone to the top of the mountain" too, and realized it was the perfect spot for a sniper.
"Free Huey" and "Burn Baby, Burn" had become the new bestselling militant mantra, pushing "We Shall Overcome" from the top of the Civil Rights pop music charts...and the hits kept on a'comin'. A gagged Bobby Seale sits at the defense table during the Chicago Seven trial where Judge Hoffman judged Abbie Hoffman and his merry band of pranksters, hipsters and Yippee lost boys. Michigan had spawned the Students for a Democratic Society on the heels of the Port Huron Statement, and from that seedling, sprang the Weathermen...and by the way, you really don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. In Detroit and the neighboring People's Republic of Ann Arbor, John Sinclair and a cadre of blue collar artists - slash - bolsheviks formed The White Panther Party, a group in spiritual alignment with the Black Panthers. San Fran-freakin'cisco had Haight Ashbury, New Yawk had the Village and Detroit had a small pisser of a bohemian ghetto known as Plum Street, artists, headshops, too much sandalwood and intense patchouli incense, panhandlers and rag tag student neo-revolutionaries from Wayne State and pants pissin' winos from the Cass Corridor...That was the backdrop...now the players.
The Motor City had it's unholy share of madmen and rock n' roll Rasputins. It was the rock hunting grounds of Her Leather Thighness, Suzi Quatro, the Amboy Dukes, Frigid Pink, the Stooges and Frost. The brothers Hodge, Dallas and Catfish. The radio station of choice was WABX, home of Dave Dixon and across the river the Canadian eh, airwave ballbuster of CJOM with it's no hold's barred middle finger attitude to the American Woman across the bridge. The Fifth Estate newspaper was the only paper worth stealing and 12th Street was ready to boil over with snipers, tanks and the National Guard, as race relations reached below sea level lows that erupted in a rage with looting, shootings, beatings, and a city left scarred and scared..it was the home of rock n' roll. It was bar bands, garage bands and basement bands. God created this rock n' roll universe in six days...on the seventh he rested but not before he created the MC5 and built the Grande Ballroom. The Grande is the quintisential Igrid Bergman of rock venues in the Motor City. Just enough erection causing sex appeal , style, grace and Ilsa elegance, ala "Casablanco" that was built in 1928 with the ballroom located on the second floor. Jazz bands improvised as Detroits elite swarmed to over capaicty to the ballroom, boppin' and jazzin' and finger poppin' into the Thirties. Then along came Bennie Goodman and the other big bands whose sound filled the cavernous ballroom with a bobby sox sexuality. In the Sixties, Russ Gibb took over and started booking bands from Jeff Beck to Cream and everyone in between. Bob Seger and Ted Nugent plying their rock trade alongside the top acts and the other local acts that comprised the Detroit rock n' roll scene, but one band came to epitomize the mucho grande days of the ballroom Grande....The Motor City Five.
The Motor City Five added an element of fuel injected energy and high octane creativity to a highly combustible mixture of rock and revolution. The turbulent Sixties were fueling the band with left-wing politics and a penchant for psychedelics, the Breakfast of '60's Champions. Bizarrely, or not, the group made the cover of the highly coveted Rolling Stone Magazine (in the days it was worth reading) without having an album out. Their on-stage antics, pitbull approach to convention and their outrageously high-powered hi-amped energy paved the way of their reputation with the effectivenss of a bulldozer clearing a rain forest. The were loud, and they were proud. They had energy to spare and you didn't have to be an Einstein to figure out that E=MC5.
In the beginning there was rock n' roll...Wayne Kramer and Fred "Sonic" Smith were high school friends and guitarists who played in several bands at sockhops which were the rage of the day before the days of rage. By 1964, the Motor City Two, were now Five with the addition of Michael Davis on bass, Dennis Thompson on drums, and a singer with a voice that seemed to erupt from a very angry volcano, Rob Tyner. Tyner originally was going to be the bands manager but didn't care for that aspect..can't get laid being a manager, eh? So he tried out as the bass player, and failed miserably. So as is inevitable in rock n' roll, the one who is the least talented musician, becomes the singer and front man. If Phil Spector built the Tycoon of Teen "wall of sound" then Tyner and the Five created the rock n' roll wall of heavy metal iron and steel that was a natural musical spawn from the blue collar-unionized autoworker City of Motors.
Enter..stage far left. The Lone Socialist Ranger in the persona of John Sinclair who would take over the duties as "manager" for the group and use it effectively to spearhead a cultural revolution through raw high energy rock n' roll. Sinclair was one of the first Marxist multi-taskers if such a thing can exist. He was head of the Detroit Artists Workshop, anarchists and artists working towards a gentle world of peace, art and anarchy. His militancy grew over the years, and he, along with others, formed the White Panter Party as the vanilla extract to the Black Panthers. The Five/Sinclair marriage lasted a few years with the band getting more revolutionary by the minute as they and Sinclair spiraled through the helter skelter Sixties, the decade that had a societal deathwish and would climax in death and disallusionment with not only the establishment, but itself.
The stage is set....
There was the Haight ...there was the Village...and in Detroit there was Plum Street. Plum Street was the envisioneed Bohemian art colony smack dab in the middle of middle america in the middle of the middle earth of the Motor City. Shops, artisans, a gentrified community unlike the rucksack roadies that were crossing the continent. Haight Ashbury, Colfax Ave in Denver and the Village had evolved over the years, a fine wine aging in an oak cask. Plum Street, in typical Detroit fashion was "assembled and manufactured" and rolled off the assembly line in 1966 with fanfare and the goddamn mayor of Detroit officially opening it! How fucking revolutionary is that? It was capitalism and commercialism trying to sell new Cadillacs in a used car lot. Yes, the artists came, yes the tourists came, and yes, the "hippies" came and were, (ready for this shit?) Persona non gratis as they did what they will do and did in those days...you know, "Spare Change?" You have to remember, Plum Street was a fake, it was not a real "woman" but a drag queen on a runway strutting her stuff, attractive maybe, but not the real deal.
April...1967...just months before the summer solstice and the flower powered Summer of Love, the psuedo-hippie scene of Detroit emulating the San Francisco Human Be-in, decided to stage a love-in, which in the blue collar votex of Detroit is an oxymoron. Let's face it, Detroit was never the sensitive type. Detroit, Rock City! Detroit, Murder City! No sissy Seattle here amigo.The "Love Locale" chosen was Belle Isle, an island playground smack dab in the middle of the Detroit River with a bridge from Jefferson Ave taking visitors to it's gardens, outdoor grilling pits, decorative fountains, aquarium, dance emporium and yacht club. The same bridge that Harry Houdini did his appendix bursting underwater escape trick from.
One of the groups playing that day was the MC5. The park was packed, the rolling papers kept rolling along, acid was dropped and music filled the park with thousands of weekend hippies, artists, musicians, bikers, hipsters, squares and narcs. Narcs in the parks was a mainstay of the Sixties. As the sun began to set with the city skyline framed in the foreground, the cops were getting restless..oh, oh, bad sign. The polizia, on foot and mounted troops stormed the crowd to move them off the island, back across the river, back to Jefferson Avenue but apparantly they weren't moving fast enough so batons were raised, heads were cracked, and all hell broke loose as the cops went anal on the "anarchy" before them.
The Outlaw motorcycle gang was also on hand and there were instances of members of the brotherhood beating up bystanders. During all this, businesses on Jefferson Ave, including the restaurants locked their doors. Liquor stores on the other hand didn't fare as well with windows smithereen'd and bro's Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker made there escape to the streets. The crowd of close to 3,000 was finally dispersed by 9:30 pm. Sinclair rationalization claimed that all the real hippies had left before the melee and the problem was caused by wannabe's and police. The MC5 had experienced their first head knocker riot, but, more were waiting in the wings on the turbulent horizon just months away, August actually, as the Motor City became an occupied city.
Detroit has this peculiar habit, religious in nature me thinks, of setting itself on fire, overturning cars, and looting. Sports mainly will be the gasoline to fuel the flames...Piston pumping win on the court, Red Wings victory on ice, Detroit Tigers ballpark win, doesn't matter. Like a Bhudist monk in Saigon, it decides to torch itself to celebrate a victory or bitch and moan about defeat. In late summer, 1967, it was a street rampage bonfire that ignited on 12 Street. Cops were in the habit in those days of harrassing anyone with long hair or black skin. In the city, a blind pig was raided by the infamous "Big Four" which were separate groups of four cops who fancied themselves Texas Rangers or some macho fraternity of law and disorder who roamed the inner city neighborhoods of Detroit checking identification of people who may just be standing around, They would arrest people in squad cars, or trump up charges on an individual, pulling one magically out of the hat, or cop helmet in this case. In a few cases, the Big Fours tactics led to the outright murder of three people during questioning. A teenager, and two prosititutes, all shot "while attempting to escape the back of a squad car". Police honchos bought the act, lock, stock and gun barrel, with a sly wink.
The blind pig raided was merely a group of black citizens hosting a welcome home party for two returning Vietnam veterans. The cops expected a dozen people to be on the premises, easy billy club pickens, but, instead there damn near a hundred of these mo'fo's. Shit...Calling all cars, calling all cars. Gotta have backup, right? The cops burst in roughing up the patrons, things started to get out of control and before you know it, riots break out. It was Dresden during the fire bombings. as the city flicked it's Bic and went up in glorious technocolor flames. Cops shot at looters, and snipers shot at cops and firemen from rooftop nests as the city and the police went schizoid with a synapse that snapped. The National Guard (the weekend warriors from the farm) were called in, along with Michigan State Police (glorified meter maids) and eventually the White House wanted in on the head busting action and ordered the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne to the scene. Christ, it was the Tet Offensive in reverse. Tanks rumbled through the streets, martial law was in force, and at the end of the 5 days the tally was 43 killed, 1,100 injured and over 7,000 arrested. Today, 12th Street has been renamed...Rosa Parks Boulevard. You can't blame this one on the MC5 or even John Sinclair. They were in town, yes, and living in the city, yes, so they were witness to the flames and brutality. In an interview Wayne Kramer relates that he was arrested during the riots as he had a telescope in his apartment window downtown. The cops saw it and busted in, cracking heads and opening them up like so many cans of Spam. Kramer was arrested as the cops claimed he was spotting uniformed targets for snipers. Incoming!! This was the Fives second encounter with a schizophrenic Demon-ocracy not taking it's meds. The MC5 and John Sinclair were now in the rifle sights of a paranoid establishment and were the poster children of the dreaded Red Squads that kept lists of "enemies of the state", a phrase borrowed from Josef Stalin no doubt, but it was the year 1968, the Chicago Year of Daley that would make all other riots pale in comparison and place the MC5 on a government hit list, marked for commercial death.
1968. The Democratic Convention in Chicago. There was a euphoric elation lifting the spirits of the younger generation accompanied by a sense of real change in the air, optimism for the future, and an arrogance on both sides of the line drawn in the generational sand. The chant of "Make Love, Not War" drowning out the Om! of Merle Haggards, "Love It or Leave It" Okie mental illness that affected an older generation with hardhatitis "my country right or wrong" philosophizing. Jerry Rubin, Uncle Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, yeah, the list goes on and on of the participants and syncophants involved. Anyone who was anyone was there. Terry Southern covering the convention for left wing periodicals, but the scene that stands out is the live telecast of regular guy journalista, Dan Rather being carted off, unceremoniously from the convention floor, with an appalled Walter Cronkite giving a blow by blow commentary. Mayor Daley of Chicago was glaring at the podium in a classic case of a Political Portrait of Dorian Gray whose time had come and gone. Outside in the park the crowd was getting as restless as villagers ready to storm Dr. Frankensteins castle to kill the Promethian beast the mad doctor had created...so with pitchforks held and decibels cranked up high, the band played on.
The MC5 were scheduled to play a free concert outside the convention hall, and they did amidst the amok and the chaos.They had been invited by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to kick out the jams, and kick them out they did, right in the balls. Just as they were finishing the cops moved in and the Five began removing their equipment as fast as they could. Having been through many riots before, they didn't need a crystal ball to know what was next on the "to protect and serve" agenda. The MC5 have the distinction of being the only band to actually perform a free concert amidst the melee and police riot that subsequently defined the American meltdown of the American wet-dream, and many were now thinking of bullets over ballots. The revolution was on....or so we thought.
Following the Demo-debaucle, the MC5 clicked their revolutionary Red slippers (There's No Place Like Home) and returned to Detroit and the familiar sanctuary of the Grande. Elektra Records was now interested in the band, so they sent a talent agent to hear what they had in a live performance, (along with the Stooges) and in the end signed the Five and Iggy Pop both to the label. Their first Elektra release is the now classic "Kick Out The Jams" which was recorded live at the Grande in late '68 and because the record company felt they sounded better live, decided to release the live version. Of course there was a matter of Mother Fuckers...so the dreaded, castrated AM radio version that turned Mother fuckers into Brothers and Sisters won out...ok, so it was a compromise...it's hard to foment revolution without a top ten on the hit parade. Fuck Karl Marx and his manifesto, and Mao's Little Red Book...gotta make Billboard Magazine first.
But wait...not another fuckin' riot. New Yawk this time, and a riot by any other name...not on the scale of the Newark or Detroit riots...not near the benchmark set in Berkeley at Peoples Park and the gassing on Telegraph Ave. but a riot all the same if you please. In New York, Bill Graham, rock empresario without peer had opened the Filmore East to compliment his original Filmore in the Filmore District of San Francisco, now unfortunately re-named, Filmore West. A group calling themselves the East Village Motherfuckers were the American version of Amsterdams Provos, without knowing it, and had talked Wild Bill Graham into setting Wednesday nights aside as "community night" with free shows for the panhandling proletariat who roamed the beat streets of the Village. Bill, said yes, and even had the MC5 play a freebie for the community. Elektra, the MC5 lable wanted to showcase the band to a more affluent record buying crowd so they in turn booked the Filmore (real American cash money) on a Wednesday, yes, community night. Now that was a page torn from How to Piss-off an Already Pissed-Off Mother Fucker 101. The MF's, never really a cheerful lot to begin with weren't happy and stormed the Graham Bastille. (I know, more villager visuals for the reader to consume)
Bill stood his ground outside the auditorium and refused entry, in a stance reminiscent of Gov. Lester Maddox standing in a southern academia doorway brandishing an axe handle so black students couldn't enter a white school. Next thing you know old Bill is hit with a chain by a Motherfucker who breaks his considerable nose. Inside, the band is kickin' out the jams with Motherfuckers in the audience who had crashed the party, and when the Five finished, the maddening crowd storm trooped the stage trying to rip off the Five's gear as the band itself bolted out of the Filmore as fast as their power to the people legs could run. motherfuckers in hot pursuit, roadies mixing it up in the fray, a carnival call of Hey Rube goes up and all hell breaks out. Then it happened. Two limo's appear for the band...limos? Revolutionaries...fuck...the crowd went nuts. Wayne Kramer tries to explain MC5 and White Panther theory while the crowd gets more hostile and come at him with knives just like a scene of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. Kramer does get out alive with a little help from his friends, but unfortunately, Bill Graham thought it was Rob Tyner who swung the chain at him, it wasn't but it didn't matter, this was Graham and he had more clout than God...Graham had the band blacklisted not only at his venues but within his secret society circle of promoters who made the rules and had the decoder rings to prove it.
The Five had released their album and waited for success to come a'knockin' at the door. One of the places that the newly released album was to be available was in the bands hometown mondo-monstro department store, J.L.Hudsons, the venerable merchantile dominatrix that ruled the downtown Detroit skyline on Woodward Ave for decades merchandising whip in hand. Hudson's was the equivalent of the Mall of America in it's day in the Motor City, and in fact, the Hudson family were the backers of the famed Hudson automobile including the NASCAR darling, the Hudson Hornet. Hudsons sponsored the annual Thanksgiving Parade that would cruise down Woodward from the Institute of Arts into the city center, past the Vernors bottling plant where Detroiters for decades could watch ginger ale being bottled as they gazed through giant windows. Motown had moved it's record studios from it's ghetto nest to the more prestigious Woodward Ave...all culminating in a dramatic waterfront as Woodward ended at Jefferson Avenue exposing the freighter bearing Detroit River just across from the Canadian city of Windsor.
Hudsons was the record store of choice for Motor City rock n' roll rebels. Elvis dominated the racks at one time and now it was time for the MC5...hometown, homegrown favorites to take their place on the Rock n' Roll Rack of Fame at the gargantuan Hudsons. Well, not quite. Seems the white collar sensitivities of the buying department at Hudsons, didn't take to the overtly blue collar, anarchistic war chant of the band, and the release was deemed...obscene which in itself was an obsenity. The underground press and emerging FM radio stations such as the revolutionary WABX which broadcast from downtown Detroit took the battle of the retailer to the press and the airwaves and the Five took out a full page ad in The Fifth Estate underground paper with the simple message..."Fuck Hudsons" Can't say for certain how effective it was, but today, ask any young Detroiter about Hudsons and they'll give you a blank deer in the headlight state...ask them who the MC5 were and at best you'll get "Oh fuck yeah, Kick out the jams, motherfuckers" although they will still miss the point. Let's face it, this generation is not of a rebellious nature, but if they ever do reinstate the draft I guarantee they will put down their Playstations and face it or fight it. Might even hear a chorus of Country Joe's Vietnam Rag.
It was a bit too much for Elektra, so they dropped the band faster than hot merchandise, but, they were picked up by Atlantic, who somehow thought they could make a silk purse out of this rock n' roll sows ear but that wasn't to be either. Their releases failed to chart anywhere near acceptable and the material was turning commercial which the band didn't like. Their political-managerial alliance with John Sinclair was changing too. The band was beat, and Sinclair was about to make the blunder of his life by getting narc'd. It was only a matter of time.
John was busted for giving two joints to a narc. The result was a sentence of 9 and a half to 10 years imposed on the imposing White Panther. In 1971 a glitterati of leftists music luminaries assembled in the great Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor for the Free John Sinclair Rally. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were there, and in fact the song "John Sinclair" (10 for 2) is on the "Sometime in New York" album. Rockin' Robert Seger was there, as were folk artist Phil Ochs and Howlin' poet emeritus of the beat generation, Allen Ginsberg to name but a few. Within days of the rally, the Michigan Supreme Court overturned the Sinclair sentence and from then on, the white knight was talking backwards as Ann Arbor held it's hookah high. Soon, marijuana laws were decriminalized in Ann Arbor, (many thanks to Zolton Ferency and the Human Rights Party), and combined, all these events led to the present day Hash Bash held on the U of M campus each year in academia's version of the Grassy Bowl Conspiracy. Thank you to both John's and Zolton.
The MC5 planets were no longer aligned in perfect chaotic harmony. The times were changing faster than a pit crew at Indy changing tires, the bright red of revolution had become a faded pinkish punkish hue and the war in Vietnam was only escalating and the music hadn't brought the Pentagon to it's knees. Drugs began to push to the forefront of the bands quest for the holy rock n' roll grail, and as politics became less, well, political to them, the drugs took front and center stage, forcing the band into the background and relegated as the opening act of the comedy of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, and oh yeah, by the way, a blast from the past...the MC5.
One of the tours they did before the final splitting of the MC5 atom was in Jolly Olde across the pond to the land of the Ripper, God Save the Queen, the Union Jack and a jerkoff gang of UK Teddyboys at Wembley Stadium. Fifties wannabe rockers with peg pants, bowling shirts and enough fuckin' grease to last a week in the state penitentiary. There were 50 thousand plus in attendance, and not in a mood for the new look of the Five and began pelting the band with beer cans and other hurled missles from the audience...Tyner, ever the Detroiter, began tossing them back into the audience and that was all she wrote..the band escaped from the stage and the stadium and headed back to the "sanity", they thought, of their beloved home turf, Detroit.
Nixon captured White House in 1972, the same year the MC5 said "fuckit" to the music industry. Touring and drugs wearing them down, no commercial successes and dropped by two labels will give you a complex in due time. So in true Five fashion they decided to give a farewell concert at, where else? The Grande, the scene of so many past grand MC5 performances. The farewell show was pretty much a no show as far as packing in the SRO crowd. They were offered $500 for the gig. The crowd was sparce, 250 if that, Kramer got pissed and mid-set walked off the stage and the Five Horsemen of the Rock n' Roll Apocalypse had disappeared in a nuclear flash. It was the musical version of "Death of a Salesman" the MC5 now rock n' rolls Willie Loman.
Today, the defunct Five in retrospect are regarded as gods, as well they should be. John Sinclair lives in Amsterdam as a gentle poet who at times rambles incoherently to anyone who will listen anymore. The White Panthers became the Rainbow Peoples Party and by now, all of them are run of the mill Democrats. Bobby Seale schlepps BBQ recipes, Abbie Hoffman is dead and Lennon was assasinated.
The music scene as a whole sucks today with no MC5 or Ramones or Flamin' Groovies or New York Dolls on the horizon to salvage what's left of rock n' roll. The revolution never got off the ground full speed but did make a dent in the establishments armor. The generation today is not interested in protest, in fact compliance is the mantra, not defiance. Just once I would like to here a presidential candidate stand and the podium and instead of saying things like "We must work together as one people to make a stronger America, my fellow Americans"..just once, with a wink in the candidates eye as he or she looks into the camera, smiles to the American public and says...."My Fellow Americans....screw this....it's time to Kick out the Jams, Motherfuckers!!" So, You Say You WSant A Revolution? "Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow"
Little Red Books hungrily read by hordes of angry young reds. Got your Marx and Lenin confused with Groucho and John? ...right on! It happens in the best of families. And you say, you want a revolution...that’s all well and good, but, ask yourself, do they all work as the warranty suggests, or is the reality that they are a worse curse then what they've replaced?
As a political and social scientist, I register a negative-two, positively, or lower on the Richter scale, and yes, no social scientist degree, and yes, no -ologist attached anywhere in my name, cart or horse, fore and aft, so don't anticipate any salivatory revelations or orgasmic illuminations in this piece, this, this peek through the peephole of history at the paths followed in revolutionary orbit in a rebellious solar system of social issues and rights of the people. I am merely a dumpster diver in the overflowing trash bin of pop culture and clutter that has lived blissfully ignorant and comfortably numb on the Pacific Left Coast and the Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor.
Writers words aren't gospel, although some writers will claim they are the second coming of Jesus H. (Hemmingway) Christ, truth is...forget the words, and realize it is between the lines, between the sweaty sheets of literature, that you'll find the message, as well as the white space between the words...or what a writer doesn’t write but actually omits, that tells the story and pieces the puzzle together. The old one hand clapping Zen hipster zinger. Either way, that is the chance I take writing this, but, the worse chance you take in reading it. It will look at the power to the people mantra chanting and how revolution, in it's preliminary stages creates a coagulated solidarity, but somewhere, soon after overthrow and the mask of reform is ripped from the face, the revolution and it's leaders reveal themselves for what they are and the peoples message soon gets trampled by the very same crowds who not long before, stormed the Winter Palace..the fever of revolt is usually followed by the fervor of excess and executions, retaliation replacing revolution, and the diaharea of a demagogue’s diatribe turns into a commintern compost of (in the case of Russia) communist constipation. Revolution is an internal family affair...like incest its best kept hidden away in the closet of the trailer. It's a social fabric that has torn, and in time inbred, ready to come apart at the familial seams it seems. It's a case of weird Uncle Hector fucking his 13 year old first cousin dressed in a sheer see-through frock behind the barn, why? Because he can, and the resultant child is a mutant, born with three heads similar to a freak farm animal on display at some roadside rattlesnake farm in the Southwest. Revolution is not like war where the factions are delineated by a "border" and participants from outside the "family." Nope. Revolution is a good old fashioned down home brother sister fuck. Which brings me to my point about keeping a revolution hot and juicy and alive after it's initial success...it needs the social version of KY jelly to keep it aroused to achieve what it craves....a social orgasm of formidable change of epic proportions. Don't be confused either, nor mislead with the term "civil war" ... no war is civil and when two same family sides parry, it is rebellion...nothing more, nothing less....
Those who know me have referred to me as a Tom Joad Zen socialist, tinged by the effects of years of reefer madness and staring at Diego Rivera murals too long in the sun. I have no idea what the description actually means, but, is as close to the bulls eye as anyone has come yet. Could be my Motor City Detroit blue collar union/strikers childhood, and being kidnapped and raised in the rustbelt by a pack of Teamster wolves in the urban forest.
I do believe in an ongoing evolving heat seeking humanities socio-economic revolution of every society and every strata of a society, its arts, it's social programs, it's philosophy, and of course it's layers of literature. Anthropological archeology to be studied by the studious of the future. Actual armed revolt, you know, that serious takin' it to the streets kind of shit, revolutionary rigormortis sets in, despotic degeneration eats away at the flesh of the righteous rebellion. Revolution walks with the limp, and becomes a flesh eating George Romero zombie, cannibalistic, eating itself and choking, doesn't keep revolving as it should...a planet on it's axis, a planet around it's sun, the hands of clock moving to count off the hours of the day. It stops. The sign post ahead...The Twilight Zone.
This patchwork piece is merely a reflection of revolutions, Communist revolutions primarily...although the French and the Americans had their own bout of exuberant excess in laying the foundation of popular emancipation. These, the communist’s editions of Revolution 101, were not necessarily successful in the long term, nor models to follow in the short term, but rather behemoths of unimaginable lumbering longevity.
Each revolution was camp followed immediately by the whores of paranoia, planning Prozac retaliation against those pesky isolation ward voices heard only in the head of the head of state that were interpreted as a street corner preacher preaching reaction. The walls of Jericho had nothing on the foundation these revolutions, as the process of the delirious deterioration of human rights began it's handling of snakes and speaking in tongues, which created the lack of ideological anchors that were designed to hold the ship of revolutionary state safely in the harbor of the societies reformation. In other words....it all went down the crapper.
Revolution takes a number, and gets in line. A 19th century peasant women with a babushka thing, you know, a rag scarf over her head, she has bad teeth and she needs a shave let alone a bikini wax, as she stands stoically in a Ukrainian bakery on a Saturday morning in random order of rebellion.The Russian Revolution is regarded as the undisputed World Series of revolutionary events as pastry...it is also the model of how things can go horribly wrong and it's guided missile of social reform can be misguided from it's inception immediately following a faltering overthrow.
The 20th century industrial age, no inhibited Hobbits inhabit, however it is a dream catcher of Wobblie workers of the world ready to ignite and unite. Revolution. Pinkos. Commies. Socialists. Bolsheviks. Anarchists. Menshaviks, Trotskyites. The Age of Aquarius it aint, nor was. Its roots were deep in the socialist soil of the prior pre-horseless carriage century of steam and turbines....The Red Revolt is the flashpoint where the Utopian garden of Marxian Eden turned into a compost pile of rotted leftist leafy matter left behind by Lenin's leaflets eventually mutating into the homicidal stain of Stalinism. Say what you will about Hitler, Stalin with 20,000,000 purged and killed, made Hitler look like Ghandi by comparison.
Tsarist Russia (Tsar? Czar?) was not just about priceless shining bejeweled chandeliers and fabulous eggs by a flamboyant Faberge...they were however two of the three-dimensional symbols of the growing tsunami that was swelling into a giant wave of resentment of the Rus people for the Rus leadership. The Tsar may have been the thorn in the side of the Russian people, but the people were about to become a royal pain in the ass to Royal Russia.
From the Steppes to the Tundra...it was a not so pleasant peasant land of ox carts, antique farm tools, modern day serfs, according to Bennett, abject poverty and subjective taxes..all tossed into a chipper shredder that was bleeding and crushing the populous like so many of Steinbeck’s grapes of wrath. The workers ate stale bread, stolen bread, when they could get even that, while the royal family, would fastidiously feast on wild beasts, wilder game and choice meats. They lived an openly opulent lifestyle, wrapped in obscene luxury, wanting for nothing, as the masses starved, wanting for just the basics. In this political setting, a blinded Tsar Nicolas could not see the forest of reform, for the trees of dissent. The land we know as Russia is well known for its Bolshoi, but at this juncture in the crossroads of time, the Bolsheviks were tired of the bullshit.
This was the also the age of the restless revolutionary pamphleteer. The graphic mimeo minions. The Bolsheviks cranked up the volume of a message of a socialist utopia and the words were pouring from the printed pages of proletarian produced pamphlets propelled by propaganda on Viagra that ran as thick, and as it turns out, as red, as a hemophiliacs blood. The proletarian psyche was now psyched, ripe as peaches to taste the fruit of revolt, they were in effect..."Hot to Trotsky"....Lenin raised the flag, led the charge and pitched battles broke out in the streets ...in the end, twists and turns later, a minor Civil War added as a punctuation mark, the Czar and his loyal royal family were rounded up and, no good way to put this,...disposed of, ok, killed, in revolutionary fashion..every revolutionary action is designed to prevent a reactionary reaction....the country had been at war in Europe for years, WWI, and they were shell shocked, the people had had enough and the result is that the incarcerated royal family was imprisoned and cell shot.
Good Golly Miss Gulag! The Gulags dot the landscape in the 1920's and 1930's, so many houses and hotels on a Monopoly game board. Arrests and trials, propelled by patent paranoia, the jails filled quickly like a backed up sewer with imaginary enemies, real enemies, socialists, trade union leaders, clergy, military, and plain old peasantry arrested capriciously and filling the cells to capacity. Eventually Stalin turns from the Man of Steel to worm food and does the world a favor by dying, and the Soviet Union gets Kruschevfied on a communist cold war cross and eventually Gorbachev'd into a Russian version of "democracy."
The Cold War, replaced the Hot War. Nuclear annihilation seemed a reality, looming darkly on a mushroom shaped hopeless, helpless horizon. America was doing the math and the domino effect of multiplying communism was adding up in Korea, China, Vietnam and of course on our very doorstep, 90 miles off shore in Cuba. All of this kept America in a state of holocaustic anxiety, and the film Dr. Strangelove, strangely enough, doctor Kubrick, summed up all our fears in one cinematic package that still stands on it's own black and white merits today.
The Iron Curtain came down hard on the stage of the Eastern European theater at the close of the war, the Big One, Number Two, one of many wars to end all wars. Eastern Europe had traded in fascism for communism, and soon, revolts within the revolt erupted as Hungary was hungry for democratic reform and the freedom fighters of Czechoslovakia where Chzechmated with a show of force and tanks.
The race for space, nuclear arms superiority, spheres of political influence, Two bully nations set out to carve up the world like an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey, but the Soviets were out rumbled and out rubled in the Texas Death Match of national defense, but mostly, the revolution failed due to decades of military paranoia, political purges and racial pogroms.There were too many Five Year Plans that extended into ten years; too many Politburo and Dumas fat cats setting themselves up as revolutionary royalty, creating a worse class system then the one they had replaced. The communist cure, became the cancer instead, but by the 1980's paranoia paved the way to perestroika. The Gulag system crashed to the ground like the Twin Towers to a rubble of glasnost and Gorbachev, and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down at Checkpoint Charlie like a truckload of tinker toys and East could finally meet West.
Cuba. When it comes to government overthrows..this one is the sexy tits and ass floor show of revolutions....and proved that in on a third world island nation, when it comes to revolution...there is no business like show business...Cuba...a most sexy and sensuous Soviet satellite. A Caribbean island paradise of carnal pleasures, where pussy and politics go hand in hand along with the rum soaked bacchanals since the United States hijacked it during the Spanish-American War in 1898. An outlandishly flamboyant island nation of sexy, curvaceous and long leggedy African heritaged females, dressed as plumed dancers on brightly lit casino stages, next door to premium grade heavenly whorehouses in decadent old Havana with a stable full of sex floor shows involving everything from one on one on one lesbianism to Hi Yo Silver beastiality....giddyup! It was the private American play land of brothels, good times, and bad gangsters, like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and Third World American hand picked hand puppet leaders, like Juan Bautista, who was America's Howdy Doody on a string and a devoted fetishista for a fashionable form of facism.
The mob made Cuba an offer it couldn't refuse in the 1950's. The rich got richer, and the poor once again, got poorer. The country was as ripe as a field of sugar cane for revolution, when cabana's would give way to Companero's and beach bums would make way for beach bombs. It was time for the Mafioso to make room for the Marxists and Lansky to surrender to Lenin. It had been a long struggle, but on New Years Eve, 1959.....the island nation of Cuba began it's long trek on the Kremlin Brick Road to take it's place 90 miles off shore to become the Soviet suppository poised to ram up the ideological ass of the Ugly American.
Revolucion had been brewing slowly for years in the hands of the Cuban maestros of the masses ...Fidel Castro, his brother Raoul and there brother in arms, former South American doctor, Ernesto Guevara...or Che as he is commonly referred to on t-shirts in head shops around the world right next to the bong pipes. Together, they managed to orchestrate the overthrow of the Bautista regime to a raging hot, hot, hot calypso beat. The beat was loud, ten plus decibels at least, as the record spun, one revolution at a time at a speed of 33 revolutions per minute, and Castros message was crystal clear, and pure High Fidel-ity.
Castro, enamored with American sports, baseball, hotdogs and all things America, wanted to play ball with the "free" world, and I use that term loosely, so he went to New York to speak to the United Nations, and to countries including the United States for some sort of cooperative agreement to work together with the new Peoples Republic. That very term, A Peoples Republic is repulsive and repugnant to the likes of Uncle Sam (of the people, for the people and by the people)...but if Big Brother can call the shots, that is a different story, but Castro wasn't about to let them extend the control they used to enjoy over his new country, so the U.S. began it's bully tactics to back Castro down.
So, Castro goes next door to the Soviet Union to borrow a cup of political sugar and the Kremlin was only too happy to accommodate him. To America, Cuba was a piss ant third world county, but to those cagey KGB types in Russia, they envisioned a giant erector set of armed nuclear missiles strategically aimed at America Thus began the arduous Cuban Missile Crisis and an untold number of bungled CIA led assassination attempts against Castro, and the conspiracy theories only multiply from there like rabbits. Just ask Oliver Stone.
The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight in the Mid 1980's and the economic umbilical chord to Cuba was severely severed. Cuba's economy faltered, and that damned American embargo is still imbecilic ally in place. Vacationing Canadians and economics minded Europeans on business trips go there all the time, but Americans are still banned from visiting or doing business in this land of 20,000,000 potential consumers. Which is the type of halted reasoning that marks the time when the clock stopped, as America heads into the future with geriatric politics 50 years old, proving that a democracy with Alzheimer’s doesn't always work either when there are no term limits...America....no country for old men.
So, in theory the Cuban Revolution worked, although held together today with economic duct tape lo these many years later. It has become the Rolling Stones of revolution. Today, Cuba is struggling, but getting by, and the political climate is changing. The rest of the world has thrown open it's doors and windows, and although Kennedy was cut down, and all the other presidents dead or retired...Fidel marches on like a Timex watch...he takes a licking but keeps on ticking...he is also president of a country that, thanks to a slow economy and the need to hold onto everything and waste not, want not, things like old cars abound. Chevy's, Buicks, Nomads, Woody's, ponderously ply the ornamental balcony'd streets of hood ornament Havana and internal combustion Cuba has become one massive V-8 under the hood, power to the people classic car show on wheels! Hot cars Hav-an-a blast!
The Sleeping Red Giant of China. More than mere Mao. It's a melting pot of proletarian posturing on everything from Taiwan to the Manchurian Candidates vacation hot spot of North Korea (yes, another revolution/Civil War that is holding America at bay to this day..the Forgotten War. Stalemate.) The I-ching Chiang Nationalists had to partner with the Maoists to fight the Japanese...lets face it, it takes three to tango in the Sino-Japanese war.
Once the common enemy, Japan was defeated, by the Nationalist and Communist forces of the Chinese schizo-political two headed Medusa....America backed Chiang...until it got bored and eventually pulled the rug out from under the defeat feet of Mr. and Mrs. Spare Change Chiang. At this point, Papa Ooh Mao Mao moved into the driver’s seat of power...while the Chiangs thumbed a ride to tie one on in Taiwan.
Little Red Guards, Little Red Books, Little Red Stars (looking strangely today like a Macy's Christmas ad)...and an atrocious taste in clothing that would never be seen on Project Runway...spare, sparse and utilitarian...Chinese revolutionary clothing are the epitome of what is found at a clearance sale in the basement of a Salvation Army Mission in downtown Gary, Indiana...that is about as low on the skid row fashion scale as you can go,.... red-rags for the rag-tags. That is part of the reason that America only gives lip service to human rights violations in China, as opposed to attacking them as we like to do to other countries...You can't fight a war with imperialism effectively if you're not accessorized properly. Capitalists like a nattily dressed adversary to spar with.
Now if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...take that Little Red Book...it ain't Steinbeck, it aint Hemmingway, but it's a best seller in China and outsells the bible by billions in the Mao-belt. The Counter Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, c'mon, how many revolutions within a revolution do you need? Or to put it differently, how many revolutions does it take to screw in a light bulb?
China today has gotten orgasmic and has taken to a body politic of copulation between communism and capitalism in a big way, fiduciary fornication, marketing and selling and manufacturing just about anything and everything you can find in home or office. It's a definite Yin-Yang thang. China no longer says "phooey," to Hong Kong, chop suey economics, is embracing its import/export foreign trade fornication superiority over the United States. I received a American Flag pin recently from some misguided VFW post for a journalistic piece I did on their Voice of Democracy program, I still don't know why, .anyway...I unwrapped it from it's plastic and looked at the back...yep, Made in China! Irony for Imperialism, eh? It's like getting raped without a rubber. Of course, even the rubber would be made in China.
China is mucho mysterioso and today its money markets and the stock exchange have replaced its Great Wall. Confucius made room for capitalist confusion and economic dichotomy in its public square psyche...Tiananmen Square...American outrage ...the outcome? Business as usual...America doesn't see red in China anymore...it sees green and that drives the machine.
This is one Communist led revolution that has been a success under the circumstances..ecomonically, militarily, and diplomatically with the so called "free world"....Cuba too, for it's sheer staying power and longevity and muy gigante Castro cajones in holding off the Beast for decades, and then...there is Vietnam....and it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? 50,000 dead ... an American crime against itself. We were told "go fuck ourselves" and being who we are, we did just that.
Those feisty Vietnamese ricers beat the crap out of the Japaneses, flambeaued French imperialism into French toast at Dien Bien Phu and then Giap wholloped the heavy weight contender, the Ugly America with a resounding knock out victory and a final score of 53,000 Americans dead, needlessly. If nothing else, the conflict of conscription led to demonstrations back in the states, mistrust of the government, rioting, Black Panthers, SDS...it ignited a revolution in the Sixties. Women’s rights, human rights, civil rights, gay rights. No, it didn't result in the overthrow of anything except a collective human conciseness., Lets face it, the other side had more guns but we had more flowers, and we learned never take a gardenia to a gun fight. The French Student Revolts of the Sixties however are modern day models of proletarian efficiency and that is because they took less flowers to the barricades. Next time...leave the flowers in the garden.
It did change our concienseness and spawned a new and improved generation of Tom Joad inspired Tom Hayden types...politicians who over time, ripened, and softened, turning into just plain old liberal Democrats, (dogs without teeth) no longer street fighting activists. So in essence, Vietnams own revolution infected it's violator, it's rapist, America, with a revolutionary spirit, and gave America a dose of political clap, it's side effect, residual effects, made it the most influential revolt of all time.....a comedian at the time regarding democracy said..."Why are we trying to ram democracy down the throats of Vietnam at the point of a bayonet. In my neighborhood, if something is that good, they steal it..."
There will be no such outcry today in draft-free America over Iraq or Afghanistan. The thinking is that it's only volunteers whose asses are on the line, along with the civilians of those countries, so the world doesn't really rally or stand up loud and proud and take notice, except the families of the dead, and a few quietly, passive activists, reserved and resigned to the fact that their "warriors" died for a good cause, whether or not it is, or was, or will be. Not mine to judge. Most wars are stupidity of the highest order anyway. But...as with all revolutions, eventually, the walls come tumbling down.
In the past, America has managed to back its own future enemies along with dictators who ruled their countries with an iron fist, and we backed them as long as it was in our best interests. Examples: Batista in Cuba, the Shah of Iran, Chiang Kai Shek, Joseph Stalin, ...hell we even backed to the hilt Saddam Hussein (he was keeping Iran at bay for us) and leave us not forget that at one point we gladly armed and supported and in effect created our own enemy in Osama Bin Laden in his peoples revolt against the Soviet Union. America backed the Brits in India against Ghandi in post WWII, and the British claims to Palestine.
A good rule of thumb...if America is backing a world leader...chances are that leader is destined for the political guillotine, and will be overthrown by their own angry populace, or at some point that backed leader will turn on it's Master becoming it's sworn enemy, such as Bin Laden...in America we're lucky, unlike the old Soviet Union, you can disagree with this countries policies...as long as it's not too loud, too proud and too far left of Pennsylvania Avenue.
..So..you say you want a revolution..."the revolution will be televised." The White Rabbit Meets the Hells Angels The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, or just plain old Woodstock to anyone who survived the Sixties, as three days of mud, drugs and sex. It was billed as an "Aquarian Exposition of Three Days of Peace and Music" that began on August 15, 1969, and was held on a 600 acre farm in upstate New York. In all, 32 acts performed and by the end of the festival, more than 500,000 attendees had tie dyed their way by bus, foot and thumb to be at the "vortex" of the counter culture for this Kodak moment in time, freeze framed forever in the history of rock and roll music.
Acid flowed freely, free love and sex left a vaginal imprint, as wet and thick as the torrential rains that added to the wilderness wildness of things. It was a moment in time captured by the counter culture, and is legendary as a peaceful assemblage of near half a million young souls and spirits in unity. So many people descended on this strip of sacred agricultural ground that Arlo Guthrie yelled, "The New York Thruway is closed, man!" and Country Joe McDonald did his own calculation of the crowd by announcing.."There's about 300,000 of you fuckers out there!"
The festival ended, and it signaled the end of the Aquarian Dream, for many did not know it at the time but, the Devil was looking for Faustus and some sympathy, and would get it in spades four months later at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California. When the Rolling Stones headlined a concert promoted by a who's who of San Francisco including the Grateful Dead and KSAN disc jockey, Stefan Ponik. (I would listen to Stefan's show when living in the Haight) Eventually he became General Manager of a San Fran area radio station that hired me as "a renegade" as Stefan put it during my interview. "I want every rule of today's radio broken, and from what I can tell and have heard, you don't listen to management or take direction very well" ... I was hired on that basis! Ok, so I'm not a team player. Stefan was one of those radio animals that let you run free, no fences, and unfortunately, that was how it was at Altamont...no rules, but plenty of beer and Sonny Barger's Hells Angels loaded for bear on beer and looking for an excuse..any excuse..for anything.
Back to KSAN radio, it was the most radical of the emerging FM stations in the country. It was the musical wheel of the San Francisco counter Culture along with Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, Winterland Auditorium and the Matrix. Stefan would host the night show with guests in the studio such as Jerry Garcia and Doug Sahm, Marty Balin, and anyone who was anyone in the San Francisco scene. As Stefan told me at lunch one day, "We'd be smoking and joking and getting loaded up on the building roof while the music was on and then get back in the studio to do our bit. It was a great time, a great time to be alive and a great time to be in radio, and certainly a great time to be in San Francisco!"
The original locale for the concert was to be held at the San Jose State practice field, but there had recently been another music festival in town with 80,000 people in town for three days, the city fathers decided, they had had enough and cried "Uncle!" A hearty NO resounded from the south bay enclave so new plans had to be formulated. Next..why not hold it in Golden Gate Park...but, lets face it a Free Concert vs a San Francisco 49er's game at Kezar Stadium on the same weekend? Kick off!
Sears Point Raceway was also on the new short list but there was a problem putting up the $300,000 needed in advance for use of the speedway. So, sensing an opportunity, more of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, The Altamont Speedway owners offered it's facility and would do what it took to lock the deal down and dirty.
Then a fateful decision was made. Security at the venue for a concert this large needed more than Eagle Scouts to maintain the peace and order and protect the stage area, so Sonny Barger was contacted to negotiate terms for the Hells Angels to act as the 82nd Airborne of the Altamont show. Rolling Stones management actually made the deal on recommendation from the Grateful Dead who had used them before, albeit not for a show this large. Besides it was said in a later interview by Barger in Rolling Stone, "We don't police things. We're not a security force and we go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun." Payment for services rendered was to be in beer. It was a recipe for disaster on the counter culture horizon.
In a later interview with Stefan Ponik, he stated, " What we learned was although peaceful at first, over the course of the day, the mood of both the crowd and the Angels became progressively agitated, intoxicated and violent. The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were highly drunk. Fueled by LSD and amphetamines, the crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers."
It was time for the White Rabbit to meet the Angels of Hell as it fell down a rabbit hole of violence... Altamont -Speed Kills One thing you don't do is knock over a Hells Angels' bike. To a one percenter that is a sacrilegious act that is more than a mere mortal sin. It is biker blasphemy! Unfortunately this did happen, and though minor sounding at face value, this became the flashpoint that touched off an avalanche of violence that gained momentum as the afternoon wore on, and in fact became so intense that the Grateful Dead, one of the prime promoters of the festival, decided to keep on truckin' out of there and refused to perform. Sugar Magnolia decided to hit the high road as Casey Jones high balled it back to San Francisco!
The growing violence was not confined to altercations between the concert going public and the Hells Angels. Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, ended up getting punched in the head and was actually knocked unconscious during their performance. Obviously to Marty, the Angels were not Somebody to Love. Unless you're into that sort of S&M thing, and yes, some people do pay good money for that. The point of no return had been breached and reached, as security was falling apart and Dr. Jekyll was now Mr. Hyde in plain sight.
Adding to the restlessness was the fact that the Stones waited until sundown to perform. It seems they forgot to bring along Bill Wyman who missed the helicopter ride to the speedway. When the Stones finally jaggered on stage, the crowd was staggering from too much booze, LSD and speed, and at this point the 5,000 strong Trojan Horse decided to rush the stage in a scene reminiscent of the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace.
Jagger was also attacked as he emerged from the helicopter. One of the concert goers who apparently had no sympathy for the devil landed a punch on the King of Swagger. Visibly shaken, the Stones set got underway anyway and Jagger pleaded in song with the unruly crowd, "Please allow me to introduce myself...I'm a man of wealth and fame," It was all the crowd needed as a fight broke out among the assembled around the stage front. Jagger asked for calm, and the Stones did manage to get through that number. But, gasoline had already been tossed on the raging fire. It was during the song "Under My Thumb" that an 18 year old concert goer, Meredith Hunter ended up under Hells Angels fists and boots as he tried to climb up on stage during the set. He was grabbed and told to get lost, which he did, but then decided to return, more loaded, and angrier than ever by all accounts, and this time, a Billy the Kid wannabe, started pulling a revolver out of his pocket, intent unknown, and while most would back away from this type of situation, to a Hells Angel, it's party time.
The Angels were now in Special Forces mode and one of them grabbed Meredith, knocked the gun aside and stabbed him five times in the upper back. Other Angels joined the biker version of the Bristol Stomp and Meredith already dying, was beaten to death. The Hells Angel who did the stabbing was later arrested, tried and found not guilty as it was determined to be self defense. An autopsy found that Meredith was loaded on amphetamines and was living proof..Speed Does Indeed Kill!
The Dead wrote songs about Altamont including "New Speedway Boogie" and "Mason's Children. Rolling Stone Magazine later stated, "Altamont was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity.” The article covered many issues with the event's organization and was critical of the organizers and the Rolling Stones. One Rolling Stone writer stated, “What an enormous thrill it would have been for an Angel to kick Mick Jagger's teeth down his throat.”
As the year's passed, the mystique of Altamont would not die. An FBI report later stated, that some Hells Angels, wanting revenge, I guess for a tarnished reputation, (now, that's irony!) were going to kill Jagger. They supposedly were going to use a boat to reach the house Jagger was staying at on Long Island, but the boat was sunk in storm, ala the film Key Largo with Bogart and Robinson.
Woodstock and Altamont were warning flags. One was a mud bath, the other a bloodbath. Both signaled the end of an era and the dream of peace and harmony. There were other warning signs on the hip horizon. and carried to schizophrenic extremes as Timothy Leary's peace and love mantra would soon be overshadowed by events that would take the tie-dyed generation from Kaleidoscopic beauty to a bright, deadly Clockwork Orange, as Charles Manson was ready to take center stage and the Flower Power skies were darkening into a thick dark black, as deep black as dried blood in a L.A. mansion where the final nail was pounded into the coffin of Peace and Love. The Sausalito Stripper and the Artists Wife The White Rabbit finds somebody to love...and, damn, Grace was slick! Spring had sprung like a leaky pipe in 1967 and the popularity of the marches against vulgarity, spelled V-i-e-t-n-a-m were increasing, furthering the polarity of the political spectrum of the American two party rectum. It was an age of mono...mono records, mono nucleosis, as well as other things, such as the gravely voice of Barry McGuire prophesying a full evening of nuclear destruction, The times also found that it had lost it's rights civil, and had to right that wrong. It was the social fabric coming apart of the velvet of the Elvis underground and the Sinatra Sumatra Trading Company of Tea's and Spice and bronze dark slaves from Borneo, leeward and windward and wayward, butch haircuts, G.I Joe jes' not fashionable anymo' as the bleacher bleach blonde Barbie banged Ken the boy pussy, who later would run off with one of Mattel's little beachy blonde boy puppets from the other team hidden away in a box on a back shelf at boy toy's are us, later adopting a tranny toy from Indo-knee-sha and living happily ever after living a a flip the coin, heads or tails, real life fairy tale.
"Hippie Haven", hailed the hallowed headlines from New Yawk to Detroit to Sioux City to Denver to Phoenix. The wires carried the story of strange ethereal surrealistic somethings happening if you sought the truth if you were a sojourner to San Francisco. Dirty, filthy longhairs and no-nonsense non-Nietzsche darkies mixing together, a bag of white and black marbles, smoking something big, greenish-brown, leafy with tiny spaceship seeds that caused an opaque screen to rise while a 35mm film camera projected colorful dancing dreams on on it's background. They started coming in driven droves, the youth of America pouring through the spigot flooding the streets of the Haight. Highways clogged like a backed up sewer on Mack Ave. with V-Dubs and scrubby rabble, yeah, those real life 'Angels with Dirty Faces' meandering down the asphalt rivers to the psychedelic mescaline Mecca, just me and old Bobbie McGee...eight lanes of traffic merging into a two lane Vulcan mind-meld so you couldn't move or breath, the Bay Bridge at the apex of the mournful morning rush hour. San Francisco was now the sun....absorbing thousands of small particulates of the population, it's young actually, and thankfully Mike had an apartment and was well established at this point writing furiously in an attempt to capture time and space as it happened and was perceived.
He held court at the apartment on "the corner" of the tie-dyed quadrant of the new universe (today a large retailer has taken over what once was a combination opium den and free love harem) and had gotten involved in working with a coffee house up the street where new arrivals, young, fresh and scared could come, get counseling if need be, a hot cup of chocolate, sandwich, camaraderie or just someone to talk to. Mike, gleefully stoned every day, and needed counseling himself, nonetheless took charge of scrounging small tables and small wooden chairs for the center. He also decorated them with chalk and paints and varnish, and even fashioned some chess board designs on some. No table matched another, no chair matched any table, a habit he carried with him to this day. Although not a counselor nor did he feel the need for one, the staff all had a crack at opening his coconut but couldn't. He would be the living anti-Christ of hodge-podge deco to television decorators on cable today causing many a fall of the limp wrist on the home improvement battlefield. He did however manage to get one of the counselors,to smoke a joint and drop a hit of mescaline, later acid, proving that anyone had a chemical price, and soon the incorruptible were corrupted and the two became friends forever, until John, that was his name, John McCloud, 19 years Mike's senior, who lived life to the fullest, until his cup ranneth over and he died in 1993.
John lived across the bay across the bridge in Berkeley, had a BMW motorcycle and a V-Dub bus that would carry Mike and the rest of the chemical cadre to places like Bad Water, Death Valley for traipsing and tripping in the desert sands, (where later Mike would meet Doc Yucatan and Sandoz Cerveza for some real S.O.B. south of the border bordello and cantina adventures) camping at Big Sur, peanut butter and jelly sunrises atop Twin Peaks and Mt. Tam, hiking the Jackboot Trail in Muir Woods south of Bolinas. John also had a girlfriend named Olivia leading them all to believe that the world was populated only by Olivia's, gifts to the earth from the Goddess Olivia who cloned herself for the enjoyment of and supplication from mere mortal man.
The Dubster would also load up the Hashbury Hipsters, and transfer them to Mandrakes bar over in the Peoples Park Republic of Bezerkly to watch the Flamin' Groovies perform on small wooden stages in the small bar booze venue, while at the same time haul the Haighters to the Fillmore to eat apples and sit on the floor, watch the liquid Indian light shows listening to Buffalo Springfield, Santana, Albert King, Jefferson Airplane, and hum strum dum drum along to Inna Godda Da Vida, baby. John was also a film maker and photographer who took a photo of Mike selling newspapers on the streets that he has to this day. Along with selling pot, mescaline and acid, and a few writing pieces to mainly far-ot, far-left wing red radical rags, the Oracle and the Barb kept his head above water and safe and sound on drydock land in an apartment that posed as a Victorian beach.
Back to the youth center...it was the nucleus of Mikes life at the time, and years later, Mikes parents continued to send checks for funding every year to the centers director, Howard Rocheford, until the center closed, and Howard too, passed away in the Nineties as did Mike's parents, so the checks stoppd, just as quickly as death snuffs out a life.
In the spring of '67 tornadic events swirled about in beautific technicolor in St. Simon's Marxian below ground sub-urbia. The sexual revolution was erect and erupting with the tensile strength of Erectile Promiscuous, a gift from the plethora of plentiful penis promises of Prometheus. Sexual activity was a vaginal bus stop along the pubic boulevard and you could transfer at any station and enter any tunnel.
One day, placidly and irrepressibly stoned in the Panhandle just south of Haight, Mike sat against a tall tree, smoking a joint, quietly when suddenly, the quietude was pleasantly interrupted by a girl on a smallish motor-sickle stopped at the corner waiting for the light to change and looked over at him. She was blonde, she was tanned, she had a small cc motorcycle, she was...the Amazon Queen known as California. Another Carol, she waited the light out, Mike proferred the joint from a distance, but an invitation nonetheless. She threw her head back and laughed. "Later cowboy,later," the light changed to green, damn! and she made a right turn and disappeared from sight then re-emerged again, Jesus rolling away the stone and ascending to heaven, but sexier, in a California true blonde way. She parked the bike a block away, and walked through the park to where Mike was, sat down next to him and grabbed the joint. "I told you later cowboy. I lied," and damned if he didn't fall in love with gods and goddesses above for this gift of heavenly flesh that shared the planet with him. A damned miracle is what it was, a damned miracle. Lawsy Lawdy, Massah Tom, I is free! I is free! I can walk! I can see! See? Sea? C?
She was as well groomed as a prized filly ready to be raced, and she smelled of flowers, not street stench, and her hair, a Fort Knox of yellow, and her shorts were short, revealing thighs of wonder, veritable bear traps. "You don't look like you're from the neighborhood," Mike said with a touch of sardonic inflection. "Nope," she said as she inhaled deep. "Sausalito, at least now. I'm a dancer and an artist, both, but dancing in North Beach pays better than my paintings. Wanna ride?" How did she mean that? Not that it mattered, either way it was an invite to the furthest reaches inside the temple where she maintained her stock of boy slaves, and if he played his cards right he could be one of them.
It's not like he had a job to report to in the morning, suit and tied, or anything he actually had to do at anytime anyway, so he agreed and he hopped on the back of the bike, the happiest hipster in the Haight, grabbed around her waist for safety and with hopes of copping a feel of soft fleshy breast, and off they zoomed to the Golden Gate Bridge over to Marin County and into Sausalito with it's colony of artists and recluses. Her apartment was on the main drag downtown overlooking the bay and her apartment was the best that nude dancing could buy, or rent and Mike stayed there for a week roaming the streets of Sausalito at night while she worked in the city with tassles swinging suggestively powered by what could only be described as nuclear nipples, and by day after she got up they spent the day smoking dope, making love and making pasta. At the end of the week, her egg timer had timed him out and she returned him to where she found him, in the Panhandle in the park in the Haight as he had spent his alloted time as her consort and court jester in the palace.
The sexual tide also had him in a spare tire relationship with the wife of one of the Haight Ashburys premier artists. She too had run into him in the park. She was older, in her forty's but she was alive with electic elegance and a calm beauty that radiated from within. The Ingrid Berman syndrome and effect. She would have her own key to Mikes apartment and show up when she could and when she pleased, and if others were there, they said nothing as she and Mike disappeared into the bedroom or down to the street at night to take in the sights, sounds and smells of this most wonderful wonderland, wunderbar! The took acid and listened to music, the music being their common bond that they shared and talked about for hours in between orgasms of intercourse, of course. She tought him how to cook like a pro on the small hot plates in the tiny communal kitchen, and even had him over to her house a couple of times in a huge Victorian to dine with her and her husband. "This is the writer I was telling you about," she explained to him, and him would say, "You've got to smoke this after some of this wine and then sit over there a listen to this new album," He would sit in the middle of the room in the music chair...a barber chair with headphones and get lost in the music at full volumn while Patti (not real name) and her husband would engage in riotous foreplay on the overstuffed couch before making love right then and there while Sgt. Pepper struck up the band, up, up, up.....somebody spoke and he went into a dream....
Then in March, Mike met Olivia...the Deuce. Olivia II, but in his heart for everymore, quoth not the raven, but the raving, Poe, she was Olivia Numero Uno. Olivia the Obliterator he would recall later. She was young, younger than he but he fell hard and so did she. She arrived on the street from Southern California, scared, as most were at first, but her sarcasm and wit was that of someone years older, and the in your face ness attracted Mike to her spider web and he gladly remained captive in the cocoon they both created for themselves for the next year. She was a poet, he a writer and another friend of theirs Myrika was a photographer. They had met her on the street too and she moved into the apartment that was now up to three permanent residents, Mike, Olivia, and Myrika, and occasional occupants to occupado the place with colorful street names they had adopted such as the White Rabbit (complete with British bowler hat), Rainbow, (who kept rainbow lines painted on her face), Spade, yeah he was black as they come, and others with names like, Carol, Dianne, Dave, John, Barbara, Harley (not after the motorcycle, but really, Harley. In reality an ensemble cast of over two dozen, give or take, came and go, off and on not mention those they met and brought with them to the "inner sanctum"
It was almost the Summer of Love, and the streets became clogged and crowded with weekend "hippies" and suburban refugees from the heartland of mid-Merica. The diggers were dishing out free food in the park, music was in the air, performed mainly on the stage of the flatbed truck Great White Way, the dope, she was plentiful and the sky was a zillion rainbows with prismatic balloons floating overhead and inner mind. To most, this was the beginning of something wonderful, spectacular and spiritual. It was peace and love, while Vietnam raged on unabated, peace and love not withstanding. Timothy Leary preached to the muddled huddled masses to turn on, tune in and drop out, while wearing flowers and kaftans, but over on Cole street on the other side of the garden, was a deadly apparition called Charles Manson seeking out a sect of the weak to help him become the Jesus of Mass Murder.
The political skies were darkening and within the year, another Kennedy and a King would be brought down, and flower power would give way to billy clubs on the streets of bloody Chicago. The Woodstock Festival in 1969 would fade as Altamont muscled it's way into the fray with beer bottles, knives, and pool cues and a death at the hands of Hells Angels, and the peaceful marches of an earlier time would end with the events of deaths on the campus of Kent State. A president would not run for re-election and one was impeached...no wonder Mike never voted in any election. He didn't trust Democrats or Republicans and always referred to himself as a Tom Joad socialist. and sometimes as Tom Joad himself. Yes, to many it was the beginning...to Mike...it was the end as the garden began to wilt. Do the math....It's one, two, three, what are we fighting for....equals = four dead in Ohio! Cults, Guru's & Charles Manson The Sixties had more than a garden full of guru's that turned out to be more of a compost pile of wannabe weeds. It all started with...Yogi! No, not The Bear or baseballs Berra. Yogi, not Yoda to you Seventies and Eighties Damn I Missed the Sixties kids, This was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the bearded mystical entitity that had people like the Beatles and the Beach Boys sitting at his sandeled feet and in the process...made India Hip! Ravi Shankar music and George Harrison's sitar explorations mixed audibly as a musical perfume fornicating with the scent of patchouli. A typical Sixties aroma that made up for bad hygiene along with masked the odor of marijuana coming from apartments in the Haight. The irony was that the patchoulie was indicative of the fact that something was being masked. So we went along with Donovan and fabricated the false reality of the banana peel. Peeling a fruit to get loaded doesn't work. We'd bake them in the oven slowly to get the right opiate consistancy and blackness that when dried and inhaled did absolutely nothing except give you one mother fucker of a headache. Like just smoking seeds.
Meanwhile, Donovan too donned long flowing flowered robes and boarded the TM Orient Express for a visitation with the Hipster of Transcendental Meditation, the Mahareshi. Soon the floodgates wre open, Marianne Faithful, the Stones, Mama's and Papa's, Eric Burdon...the entire Sixties Rock and Roll Bus Tour rolled into the the Mahareshi's bus depot. All tossed away their blue jeans and field jacket stage wear in exchange for long robes and gowns that were left overs from some drag queen show in North Beach. If the Mahareshi could have held sway a bit longer, Fredericks of Hollywood would I am sure come out with a full catalogue of Yogi Wear. The boots were gone replaced by what Merle Haggard referred to as "unmanly footwear" the sandal.
Yogi eventually had a falling out with John Lennon and the other Beatles, causing them to jump off the magical mystery Mahareshi Tour. George, decades later apologized to the Mahareshi for any hard feelings and as we know..Harrisons ashes are not floating down the very British Thames River, but have set sale down some mud clogged sacred cow dung filled holy artery in the former British Empire while his guitar gently weeps. The Mahareshi was a laid back damn near Rasputin-looking type, armed with chants and mantra's to stop the blue bloods from bleeding with a few magic incantations, but he and the Beatles couldn't stop a war.
Then there are the Moonies. Founded as a "religion" by the Korean version of P.T. Barnum, Sun Myung Moon who I believe was born in the small village of Suc Muc Dik, or Long Wang, managed to mangle the minds of countless loose screws. And who could forget the Krisna's who bring to mind to me not a higher state of being, but a scene from the film "Airplane" where Robert Stack decks a gowned goon in the terminal. Peace brother! I don't think I could pull off the gown look, but damn, those Krishna's loved the peach chiffon look while aggressively panhandling from passerby at airports and other terminals. I've even seen them at Greyhound stations. C'mon if you're riding the 'Hound for $50 bucks cross country you're either broke or just released from one the many mental institutions in this country leaving your meds behind in the alley. Now the voices are real, eh? Tambourines and finger bells...all trying to be Mr. Tambourine Man in time and tune with the times. Thank you Robert Stack!
Later would come Doh who waited for spaceships to abduct the faithful (again with the robes!) and of course the Jim Jones version of Disneyworld, and his Electric Kool-Aid Minus the Acid Test and last but not least, there was David Koresh and his followers that came to an explosive end in Waco. But, not was all about cults and religion, and the fine line they crossed.
Charles Manson: Dark Side of the Sixties Moon
While living in the Haight in the Sixties, there was anther resident,
resident evil in retrospect, who gained a small malleable following of the weakest of the species who would worship him as a deity, a father figure that would be the evil Ward Cleaver, with a lot of female Beavers to manipulate and few males that weren't wrapped tight. Charles Manson. If you think Chuckie in the "Childs Play" series was demented, Chuckie Manson made the puppet look like Gandhi.
The result of the Manson mantra would be the blood bath of senseless killing and the horrific deaths of Sharon Tate and others. Helter Skelter had replaced All You Need is Love...and the sun was setting on Flower Power, as the Dark Side of the Sixties Moon was emerging from the horizon.
Manson had gathered a dark cloud of looser humanity around him in the Haight on Cole Street, where he kept them pretty loaded on LSD, held orgies with abandon, making a mockery of the concept of "free love" and indoctrinating them with the Mantra of Manson. What do you expect from a person who had at this point spent half his life incarcerated in some of the finer prison cells America had to offer. How he managed to check out with out a psyche evaluation is beyond me, and not committed to a dog pound to be put down as a rabid freak.
When Manson was released from one of his many prison stints, he move to San Francisco, living mostly by panhandling, but, hey, who didn't in the Haigjht in those days. Eventually he accumulated "followers" and before the Summer of Love ended they all piled into an old school bus they had decorated in post-moderne psychedelia and traveled around the Pacific Northwest and then headed south to Los Lossangeles, picking up more nubile sex slaves per gallon along the way. He fancied himself a musician and song writer, (he had learned steel guitar by arch criminal Creepy Karlis in prison, perhaps thinking he was the next Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash. He believed in his concept of Helter Skelter which he felt was the impending race war which led to the Tate and LoBianco killings which he felt would prime the pump and get the revolution kicked into high gear. He was about as much a musician as Hitler was an artist in old Bohemia, but he did happen to run into Dennis Wilson, drummer for the beach boys in the late spring of '68. Wilson had that bushy, bushy blond hairdo that was celebrated in song, and he happened to pick up two young hitch hiking women, Manson followers and took them home with him, surfing trophies no doubt for his playpen at his Pacific Palisades play house. Insert your favorite Pee Wee Herman jokes here.
The next morning Manson showed up at the house, Manson fell to his knees and began kissing Wilson's feet when Wilson got home from an all night recording session! I guess it was the surfer sandals that turned him on. Old prison habits are hard to break me thinks. Wilson also found to his surprise at least a dozen strangers in the house, having multiplied like crazed rabbits, and all, Manson followers.
Wilson entertained his house guests for the next few months, and even shelled out cash for medical bills that totaled thousands for
gonorrhea treatments. So much for FREE love. It does have a cost especially when inmate infected. They trashed his car, and lived a life of free flowing money, from the Wilson spigot and both men had sex on a daily basis with all the women who were treated as slaves to Wilson and Manson. And you thought Brian Wilson was strange. Good Vibrations had become bad vibes, but Wilson was so stoned out of his head, he couldn't tell day from night.
Even stranger, Wilson purchased studio time to record songs written
and performed by El Chucko, and introduced him to the glitterati of
the L.A. scene such as Terry Melcher (Doris Day's son) a music big
wig, and also to a gent by the name of Rudi Atobelli who rented a home first to Terry Melcher, and later to actress Sharon Tate and her
husband, Roman Polanski who had a penchant for 14 year old girls and had to leave the country eventually, as his supply probably dried up and Europe had a stable of jail bait he could feast on in a more
promiscuous environment. Terry Southern would frequent whore houses in Paris with Stanley Kubrick that specialized in 11 - 13 year old hookers so the market was flooded with those on the cusp of flowering into womanhood, and plenty of older males around to help nurture their budding gardens.
In August of '68 Manson moved lock, stock, barrel and women to the
Spahn Movie Ranch near Topanga Canyon after Wilson's manager had had enough of the intrusion and kicked the family out of Wilson’s house. The Spahn property was the scene of numerous Fifties western shot on location, but by now was in an advanced state of deterioration, perfect for the unkempt dwarf of a pipsqueak who couldn't hold a tune or keep it in his pants. Perhaps all those surf songs of the beach boys gave him delusions of grandeur regarding his own "woody" which was probably due to his self inflated ego fueled by a Napoleonic Complex...all short people suffer from that. Ok, so I'm only 5'6" myself so don't hold that against me. I have no delusions, well, maybe a few.
Greg Spahn, 80 years old at the time was privy to sexual relations
with the Manson women on Manson's orders, and helped him around the ranch cleaning up the place which now made money, sort of by giving horseback rides! So the old man merely was a creature of habit and what the hell, saddle up a Manson girl and giddy up!
Curiouser and curiouser, Manson had listened to the Beatle's "White
Album" and proclaimed that he would be bigger than the Beatles, but even though today, there are Charles Manson T-Shirts, John Lennon still outsells him 1,000 to one. It was also at this time that Manson started expounding on the coming race war, a war that had been predicted by Manson and also the Beatles. Kind of like the 2012 end of the world. Christ, we're still here. Manson claimed that the entire Apocalypse was hidden in code in every song on the White Album. Maybe it was Manson and not Russ Gibb of the Grande Ballroom who started the Paul is Dead rumor after all.
To get ready to join in the BBQ of racial hatred and battle, the
family moved into a small yellow house near LA that Manson named, "The Yellow Submarine" and the impending conflagration was dubbed..."Helter Skelter" and he was ready now to enter the recording studio to record his own coded album that would trigger the events. Blacks would kill whites and retribution would be fierce and unyielding. Eventually the whites would loose and the Blacks would emerge victorious and proclaim Charles Manson their King. As they prepared songs for the album, record producer Terry Melcher said he would come by the house that night for dinner, which would like attending a testimonial dinner for Hannibal Lechter, minus the fava beans and chianti. The "ladies" cleaned the pad and got a dinner prepared and Melcher backed out at the last minute. What? An epiphany? A lucid moment finally? What the hell
was he thinking in the first place? It was not a good idea to snub a psycho, and Manson was now looking for Melcher Revenge and for Melcher's rental house, which he had already vacated and turned over the keys to the new tenant, a very pregnant Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski. Helter Skelter was about to kick into gear with horrifying results. How to Stuff a Wild Bikini: How I Fell In Love with the Pineapple Princess I remember fondly watching Annette Funicello as a Mouseketeer...in fact as she "became a woman" on the Mickey Mouse Club before our very eyes, our gaze was diverted from her Mouseketeer headgear to her blossoming bosom that was advancing at an atomic pace. Soon the other Mouseketeers, faded into oblivion as all eyes gazed at the latest Disney creation. Annette would eventually explode on the silver screen in a series of Beach Party flicks that put a signature on the early Sixties with a cinematic brush stroke, as much as the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean did on the radio with surf and hot rod tunes extolling the virtue of Southern California's car and surf culture.
It was all about the beach, and when you're a Midwestern kid growing up in the Rust Belt of Detroit, white sandy beaches, pounding Pacific surf and the dream of California Girls stacked up like a cord of wood in Surf City (remember, two girls for every boy!) the gravitational pull is hard to resist. Watching Annette’s breasts bust out of the confinement of training bra's was like watching Godzilla grow to immense proportions, and this was not sci-fi fiction but puberty in motion! Finally we could put aside the National Geographics we kept stashed under the mattress loaded with photos of Amazon and African women that were anthropological studies in reality..to an adult, but to a kid it was the Holy Grail of tit's and ass. Funicello in a Bikini was the 8th Wonder of the Pubescent World to rival the most magnificent of pyramids in Egypt, and thanks to drive-in movies it was time to learn how to stuff a wild bikini.
Annette started her career at the age of 12 and got jump started on the Mickey Mouse Club wearing funny mouse ears, that along with Davy Crockett Coon-Skin Caps Walt Disney managed to rocket into the marketing galaxy with astonishing results in profits. Ok, I had the ears and I had the cap, but a backwoods Mouseketeer I was not, and never kilt me a 'bar when I was only three, and I was not born on a mountain top in Tennessee, but I tuned in everyday just to see Annette and also Darlene, another early budder in the boob department.
Annette eventually started recording songs, at Disney's insistence. Let's face it, you didn't turn old Walt down or you would have to turn in your ears and go out into the real from make believe world and get a real job. Her recording of "Pineapple Princess" propelled her into the pop charts and was followed by numerous other top of the pop chart offerings that not only sold millions to the minions, but left a meteoric rock and roll impact on a young Quarryman from Liverpool.
In interviews early in the career of the Beatles, John Lennon said he was always "influenced by the Annette sound" which in reality was due to record producer Tutti Camarata who experimented with layering duel Annette vocals over the other. This gave it a richer sound quality, and the Beatles and George Martin used this often to create the same effect. Was John actually influenced by Annette’s tight sweaters and rapid growth above the waist? We'll never know for certain, but if dual vocals had an impact, I'm certain too that her other "dynamic duo" above the waist and below the neck had some effect.
Annette’s real claim to fame however, was the series of Beach Movies that teamed her up with teen idol Frankie Avalon, and did more to promote the beach and surf culture of Southern California than any Chamber of Commerce could possibly have achieved. Beach Party hit the silver screen surf in 1963 followed by Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and of course, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.
The irony of it all is that she was still under contract to Disney who did not produce the beach flicks and insisted for the sake of image that Annette wear a one piece bathing suit in the films that were paying homage to cleavage. (C'mon, showing off the human female body on a beach was taboo for Walt? That jerk gave us a steady diet of decades of mice and ducks running around with no pants! In fact in the '50's Denmark banned Donald Duck for just that reason!)
What really irritated Walt was the fact that in one of the Beach flicks, Annette’s navel was visible in just about every shot including closeups. Fuck you Walt!
The beach movies showed off Southern California’s sunshine, sandy beaches, the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean, surfers, beach parties with bongos and campfires, Harvey Lembeck motorcycle psycho’s, (gotta love Lembeck, eh?) and of course, those California Girls in California Bikini's, stuffed with treats and hidden treasure.
It was the California lifestyle that held the promise of promiscuity and perennial parties, and there it was, the Gospel according to Hollywood, set out like a bait trap to entice the innocent and the not so innocent who were not fortunate enough to be able to hang ten on the Detroit River or ride the tube on the mighty Hudson River. Smog from factories obscured what limited sunshine was available, and we had more factory workers with blue collars than surfers.
The industrial Midwest was the home of Rosie the Riveter dressed in her finest coveralls, while the west coast was home to the California Girls with wild bikini's just waiting to get stuffed! California Dreamin' was not only confined to the silver screen, but soon the AM radio dial rode a tsunami wave with a flood of "crank it up loud" radio rock and roll...surfer style, as group from Hawthorne, California were about to ride, ride, ride the Wild Surf into rock and roll history as America's Band. And, son-of-a-beach if it didn't all began with the Pineapple Princess as she outgrew her training bra! Phantom of the Popera! Phil Spector( Part One)
Just another brick in the wall? There are many bricks and many walls, some, such as the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China were designed as formidable barriers to hold back the onslaught of foreign Mongol invaders intent on rape and pillage, (Nothing like a good pillage of village, eh?) or to round up an entire East German population held as prisoners to enjoy the wonderful benefits of psycho Stalin's paranoia and KGB hospitality whether they wanted to or not, all at the point of a gun and bayonet, but then there was always the Wall of Berlin. The Wall of China.
Then there emerged on the horizon, the Wall of Sound. It was a musical wall layered in a recording studio to produce a full, rich, deep instrumental sound, that when the instrumentation had sex with the voices of Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love, split the the rock and roll atom when you heard it on the radio or put it on a turntable. It was an orgasm in mono, foreplay that reached a sexual crescendo when producer Phil Spector was in the studio, the captain of his ship, at the controls. He said in one interview, "I prefer to work in mono, and I enjoy doing singles, not albums. What do you get with an album? Maybe one or two hits, and ten pieces of junk!"
Spector is an original, an icon, a genius, and yes, a convicted murderer who had a penchant for weapons. He was above all else, the Phantom of the Popera. A musical genius with a dark side, the pop side and the gun side. At the controls in a studio cranking out pop music, he was incomparable. Remove his pop mask, and there was an ugly dark side that would frighten Edgar Allen Poe, quoth the raving!
The world of Phil Spector was one of hit singles and loaded guns. He once pulled a gun on the Ramones who were attending a party at his home during recording of the Spector produced, "End of the Century" album. According to Johnny Ramone, "When we decided to leave, Phil pulled out a pistol, and said, 'You really don't have to leave now do you?'"
In another instance of corn on the macabre Spector violence in the recording studio, was when Phil was putting the finishing touches on a Leonard Cohen Album, "Death of a Ladies Man." Lenny, as always wanted to be involved in the final mix. Phil however, had other plans, as he wanted complete control as usual, and pulled a crossbow on Lenny telling him to back off. Lenny made a hasty Zen retreat and begrudgingly let Phil finish. "The final product," in Lenny's words or word to sum it up was "grotesque"
Phil Spector was a Jewish musical bronco buster from the Bronx born in 1939, whose arena was the radio rodeo circuit. (His family moved to California after the death of his father) Phil, by the age of 19 had made his first hit recording, and by the age of 21, he was a multi-millionaire and the L’Enfant terrible of the recording industry. In time, his genius and ear for chart busters attracted a star studded galaxy of musicians who flocked to his studio to immerse themselves in the mantra of Spector's Wall of Sound. These included everyone from John Lennon and George Harrison to Bob Dylan. But it all began with a talent contest in high school where a young Phil Spector, a self taught guitarist, won a talent contest performing "Rock Island Line" by Lonnie Donegan.
Phil now had enough sock hop confidence to form his own group from his classmates (The Teddy Bears) and penned their first hit, "To Know Him, Is to Love Him" which is actually the epitaph on his fathers grave. They had to borrow money to rent studio time at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles where they recorded two songs, but it was "To Know Him Is to Love Him" that broke the sales sound barrier, selling over a million copies and going number one on the newly established Billboard Charts in 1958. In fact, it was the 7th number one single ever on Billboard. By 1959 the Teddy Bears had split up and most faded into obscurity, except for Phil who was rocketed eventually into murderous infamy, and Teddy Bear's drummer, Sandy Nelson who set the beat and the pace and tempo for many drummers who followed in his footsteps.
Phil was hypnotized with the process of recording a hit single. Any single, in fact and it was at this juncture that he decided to focus on song writing and record producing. He managed to secure a position as an apprentice with Lieber and Stoller back in New York. He had met them during the Teddy Bears Los Angeles sessions, and they were quite impressed with the young man with the giant ego, so the die was cast, and the first brick in the Wall of Sound had been laid. The rest is a Da Do Ron Ron Romp through the Sixties, where the girl groups reigned supreme, and two groups in particular would lead the charge of the chick brigade...The Ronnettes and the Crystals. Musically, they were sexual as hell, and let's face it ....we were in heat and ready to jump into the backseat with Ronnie Spector. Phantom of the Popera - Part Two
Unlike the Teddy Bears hit single, to know Phil Spector was not to love Phil Spector. Just ask Ronnie. Their deteriorating marital relationship and court battles over royalties have been better documented than the records the Nazi's kept of the Zyclon-B gassings of inmates at Auschwitz.
Tomes have been written about the ongoing battles between the Angel Spector and the Devil Spector that I won't go into any more details, if you're that interested look it up. Suffice it to say, she won in the end, and Phil took it in the end, and now fortunately is locked in a small cage as King Kong’s jail mate playmate, while Phil is now singing, alto soprano, "My Boyfriends Back" and "Be My Baby, Bubba" ...meanwhile I will continue to sing, just as Eddie Money said, "just like Ronnie sang" but...before Ronnie..before Bubba...Phil was high balling it down the fast track of the rock and roll cannonball express, full throttle.
In his new roll in the studio, Phil co-wrote "Spanish Harlem" with Jerry Lieber, for Ben E. King, and also made his bones as a session man playing guitar on the recording of "On Broadway" (Personally I prefer the Dave Clark Five version with Mike Smith vocals) Other notable recordings that were the seeds of the Wall of Sound sound Spector was experimenting with like a mad wizard included Ray Petersen’s, "Corrina, Corrina" and Curtis Lee's "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" Great songs, but not full tilt boogie Wall'd yet. The sound was on the horizon, and it took Darlene Love to make the sun rise and the sound shine,
One of the first of the girl groups Spector had his hands on and into, no pun intended, but thank you for the thoughts anyway,, was the Paris Sisters and their version of "I Love How You Love Me" and by 1961 Phil was ready to go on his own and fly in tandem initially with a partner forming Phillies Records. Along with the new company Phil found a group he wanted to produce called the Crystals. Their first two songs made the Top 20, which was not bad, but, he was still looking for that elusive magic Billboard Bullet Bulls-eye Number One Hit for his new label. His next studio project was Connie Francis' recording of "Second Hand Love" which managed to break the Top 10 sound barrier for a healthy #7 position in the charts.
Soon the chart toppers were within reach, and it was the man who shot Liberty Valance, Gene Pitney, that opened the doors of chart perception with a song he had written called "He's a Rebel." Spector being a rebel himself jumped at the song, and had the Darlene Love and the Blossoms record it. The first advance guard of the Wall of Sound was on the march, and when released was relabeled as The Crystals, with of course, Darlene Love doing the lead vocals. (She was also Danny Glover’s wife in the Lethal Weapon series of flicks) The song went Numero Uno overnight. Next Phil formed other girl groups to record, but, the big bang boom came with the release of "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes. Along with the sound, Phil new T&A sells...look at the Dallas Cheerleaders, I mean c'mon...you're not really watching the quarterbacks ass are you? If you are, keep out of my saloon, it's a dive and I like it that way. Take your piano and ferns down the street.
Other groups under the aegis of Phillies Records were Ike and Tina (“Legs that are taller then the Sears Tower) Turner and also, the Righteous Brothers, who I remember seeing on the Shindig TV show, and when asked about the duo's name, Bill Medley said, "We are neither brothers, nor we righteous!" If you're on a first date, and somehow she comes to your home after a romantic dinner out, dim the lights, and put on "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and grab your pack of Trojans, because Amigo, you've reached the Promised Land, and those two firm mountains are now within your grasp!
The Wall of Sound was a Spector technique in the studio that created a layered effect designed for AM radio and jukeboxes. Much as Ernest Tubb was one of the first country stars to go electric to be heard on jukeboxes over the drunken din of the juke joints on a Saturday night. He would double and triple instrument layerings, and using instruments not used before in rock and roll songs. In an interview in much later years, Spector referred to it as "A Wagnerian approach to Rock and Roll, producing little symphonies for the kids"
Phillies Studios during recording sessions was not purely Spector alone like a mad scientist creating life from dead cadavers. He surrounded himself (surround sound?) much as Elvis did with the Memphis Mafia with an assortment of artists known as the "Wrecking Crew" which included studio musicians such as Leon Russell and Glen Campbell. Actual arrangement duties went to his personal elite storm troopers, Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche. Mono was king with Phil. He felt "stereo" took control of the sound away from the producer in favor of the listener. He was more concerned with overall sound than fidelity.
He did do break down and produced an album. ...the classic 1963 Christmas album with a recorded message from Spector and photo of him Spector Claus. It hit the stores the same day that President Kennedy took a Dallas bullet in the head. and the country was not in a mood for cheer so it bombed at the cash register at first. Today, Ronnie takes us on Sleigh Rides every Year and Darlene Love certainly knows how to bring out the Christmas spirit with her voice, either way at Christmas time, the radio is full of Phil, and the girls groups are as sweet sounding as audio mistletoe.
The era of the girl groups ended, and it was a new age. The British Invasion had swept ashore, and earlier, The Beach Sound was competing with the Wall of Sound for airplay, and the battle between Brian Wilson and Phil Spector in the recording studio was on, along with a wave of British Invasion veterans who went into the the Kings Lair of Sound, leaving a legendary legacy of later Beatles Albums (Let It Be) and album and solo works by John Lennon (Instant Karma, Imagine & Power To The People) and George Harrison (My Sweet Lord), and Yoko Ono's "Season of Glass" recorded and produced after Johns death. The only person not happy was a pissed off Paul McCartney who wanted to "Get Back" at Phil with a hunger for revenge, with a vengeance. The Wall of Hair - Phantom of the Popera – Part Three The Sixties were beginning to fade like an old pair of worn jeans or beat up old rucksack. The Brill Building sound of the Neil Sedaka's was beginning to flounder and pop was moving into new territory. Spector, having seen the top of the mountain soon became bored and started on the path to seclusion as a recluse, much on the road that would take fellow travelers Howard Hughes and Brian Wilson. Not one who liked to be alone he married Veronical Bennett, the lead singer of the Ronettes and in 1968 and would hold court in his castle with his newly crowned rock and roll queen.
He popped out of his turtleneck on ocassion to make brief cameo appearances on everything from "I Dream of Jeanie" (Go figure!) an in 1969 as the back seat drug dealer in "Easy Rider" that set the wheels in motion for the two-wheeled adventures of Captain America and Billy the Kid, as they raced to their destiny in the deep fried south of necks of red, and America; Love it or Leave it shotgun blasts from the front seat of a shit kickers pick up truck.
But...it was the Wall of Sound that left an impact on the world of music and especially on the producers and recording engineers, some who desperatly wanted to clone the Spector sound, but also leave their own imprint on the finished product. Two marvelous examples is the Brian Wilson produced "Pet Sounds" Brian two was of the School of Mono Rock and Roll, and he Spector and he were neck and neck in the photo finish department for king of sound crown. Brian however, realizing Phil was his arch-rival was also a worthy opponent on the jousting field of grooved vinyl and went so far as to name the Pet Sounds album as he did based on Phil Spectors initials, PS...the Pets Sounds moniker came after much contemplation and good studio vibrations. Bruce Springsteen duplicated as much as possible the Wall of Sound in his recording of "Born To Run"..lets face it...the Boss has a wall of sound all his own, but add a pinch of Spector and magic happens!
By the dawn of the disco age of the 1970's Phil was back in the game and on a jet to jolly old England to record and mix, John Lennon's "Instant Karma" which hit the number three position in the charts...then the beginning of World War III between Spector and Paul McCartney was about to explode into full scale decibel warfare. Lennon and George Harrison invited Phil to take over production of the trashed tracks of the proposed "Get Back" album that were discarded for some reason known only to them.
Spector put on his Wizard of Odd robes and went to work, adding here, deleting there, changing this, changing that...the final result was that th pieces were completely reworked..new arrangements added and it was time to step back..as Get Back became the Let It Be album that hit the peak in both the UK and US charts ald sold millions worldwide. But the long and winding road was about to get longer and darker.
Paul McCartney hated the revised version of his penned "Long and Winding Road"..probably the coup de grace was the fact that he was not notified of the depth of the project and was not given a chance to assist with the final product..not that that would have mattered to Spector, remember, he packs heat!
So what does heart throb Paul do besides rake in the royalties on a massive success that quite frankly all he had to do was sit on his ass and watch the cash cow overflow? No! Instead in 2003 he releases "Let It Be - Naked" stripped of all Spector influences. Maybe it was 30 years too late or two simplistic for the modern music goer but the release became the McCartney version of the Naked and the Damned. It bombed. I have listened to both versions and quite frankly, Spectors version wears the pants in the recording studio family. Sorry Paul, Get Back and just Let It Be....
As mentioned earlier in Part Two, Spector also produced, Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" which included "My Sweet Lord" and "What is Life?' along with Lennon's "Imagine" album. Singles that are of note are the Spector produced "War is Over" and "Power to the People" and later, the John Lennon "Rock and Roll Sessions" Phil wanted to reproduce the old Wall of Sound and did it with a live recording where he utilized something like 40 plus microphones to produce the "Concert for Bangladesh" live album which was the Album of the Year during the '72 Grammy Awards.
He had influenced generations of musicians including Dion and Amy Winehouse, but the new century was now underway, and the Phil crashed through the Wall of Sound, pistol in hand and his deadly antics had now brought him into the spotlight again as an accused murderer of his girlfriend. The trial was a most notalble for Phil's new Wall of Hair look. Massive beehive hair do's that would have put Dusty Springfield to shame and in the end...the hair didn't matter, only the facts as his past notoriety came back to bite him on the ass. It was time to pack up the recording studio and trade it in for a 10 by 10 cell. Now Phil can enjoy a concrete wall..an echoing wall of surround sound as he sings quietly in his bunk in the dark..."To know, know, know him..is to love, love, love him..." Father Flotski, Strip Joints and the Shit Eating Grin Growing up in a decidedly left leaning liberal household, my parents hung out with the art crowd from the Detroit Institute of Arts theater department which exposed me to ...many "forward thinkers" and "free speechers" Television was a healthy diet of Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs and Jack Paar, all still idols today...but it was that record collection of theirs that fascinated me most. A vinyl garden of Stan Freberg, Moms Mabley, Red Fox, Rusty Warren, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, and bit and pieces of the holy grail of forbidden fruit...Lenny Bruce early recordings. No, my parents didn't know I was listening to these but combined with my friendship with neighbor Soupy Sales let to a wealth of comic material to practice with on m school mates during lunch hour in the parking lot of the catholic school grounds..how appropriate...I was now Father Flotski!
It was an education that carried me through the years on my own paths...Freberg and his "Dragonette" was a favorite but I was just as intrigued if not more so with Leonard Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce. Lenny was born in 1925 in Mineola, New York and became a front line warrior in the battle for free speech and has the arrests and convictions to prove it. He was also an American, and in 1942 at the age of 16 joined the navy and saw action at Anzio and other battles in North Africa. One night to relieve the monotony of waiting for action, he dressed in drag to entertain his shipmates..OK, they loved it, his commanding officer did not..at that point Lenny saw a way out..he kept dressing that way and admitted he had homosexual tendencies which eventually led to his discharge. (In an interview with Larry Gelbart, writer and producer of MASH, he patterned the Corporal Klinger character after Bruce's wartime antics..so when you see Jamie Farr dressed in Toledo drag...thank Lenny Bruce for this other memorable character)
After his discharge he made his way to New York playing dives and strip clubs as an MC and was quite the accomplished mimic, in fact he appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts show doing imitations of Cagney, Bogart and Robinson. Later as his "dirty" reputation was growing TV wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole...except for one man..Steve Allen who had him on his show...he was a power and the networks gave in...later Steve would also have Jack Kerouac on reading his works to Steve's accompaniment on piano!
He started playing bigger strip joints in NYC and tried his hand in California as well. His fame and infamy were paving the way to a cult following and small record deals but eventually his unreleased recorded material was put to a vinyl disc by a who's who of record industry heavyweights that included Frank Zappa and Phil Spector. Lenny created wonderful characters from Father Flotski to the Lone Ranger and even told us how to make our colored guests comfortable. My favorite story is from Lenny's autobiography where he relates the story of being at a liberal party in NYC with all the "free thinking white liberals" where one rotund business type approached him and said something to the effect, "I believe colored people should have the same rights as we do, but I'd never date a colored woman" to which Lenny replied..."Well, then you date Kate Smith and I'll try to get a date with Lena Horne!"
Lenny met and fell in love with stripper Honey Harlow in 1951 and got married and formed a double act and toured the west coast. The marriage brought to life their daughter Kitty in 1955 but sadly they got divorced in 1959. In addition to numerous drug and obscenity arrests there was the Brother Mathias Foundation fiasco in Miami. Lenny posed as a laundry man and stole priests garb from the bins and went on the street and knocking on doors to raise money for a leper colony. Before he was arrested as an imposter he had raised over $8,000 and sent $2,500 to a leper colony.
The big obscenity bust for use of the word "cocksucker" was in New York and the literati turned out brighter than the Northern Lights to speak on his behalf including Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Paul Krassner, Nat Hentoff, Susan Sontag and James Baldwin. A patron at the club objected to the word "cocksucker" and Lenny in court claimed.."the guy probably can't come!" He was convicted and sentenced to four months in a work house but released on bail pending appeal. He died before the appeal was heard and eventually overturned.
His life was a test of free speech...George Carlin in an interview said, "He was a comedian, he was an entertainer, but most of all he was a social commentator" tackling issues from race, religion, Jewishness and bigotry. Today’s comedians go out of their way to shock for the sake of shock..Lenny did it to prove a point and pave the way. When it comes to free speech thank Lenny and Mario Savio, who both paid the price for daring to defend the First Amendment!
While in California, Phil Spector produced a live concert of Lenny's and so did Bill Graham at the infamous Fillmore Auditorium but the curtain was about to come down and on August 3, 1966 Lenny was found dead of a drug overdose lying naked on his bathroom floor with syringes all around, empty vials and had what was described as "a shit eating grin" on his face.
The photos taken of the death scene were tragic...and before they could bet to the press and frenzied media..Phil Spector made arrangements and bought the photos and negatives to keep them from appearing in the newspapers. The funeral too was low key but Phil Spector organized a public memorial, even taking out ads to invite the public and advising them to "bring a box lunch!"
Lenny’s legacy of free speech lives on in comedians today who are still influenced by the man who taught us how to “talk dirty and influence people” He is part and parcel of pop culture...he's one of the chosen on the Sgt. Pepper album cover and in Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 o'clock News” piece...there is the report of Lenny’s death., the real death of hip.
But the final eulogy was in Playboy Magazine in a final farewell article by Dick Schapp (Yes...THAT Dick Schapp). He said "One final four letter word for Lenny Bruce..DEAD at forty..now that's obscene!"
The Hipster Spake Nazz More Than Zarathustra
Take an ex lumberjack, if there can be such a thing, (they are like alcoholics, once a lumberjack, always a lumberjack) Lord Richard Buckley, the mustachioed fully automatic aristrocratic dispenser of monolgue that flowed from his mind faster than sex on viagara influenced a decidedly hip and counter culture underground that frequented dingy clubs and back alley coffee houses in the fifites. His mercurial flow of hipster jargon in story form gave us such delightful characters as Gandhi or in Buckley language..the Hip Gahn..the Marquis De Sade (The King of Bad Cats) and even tackled the classics from the Gettysburg Address to the Raven. Among those who fell under the Buckley spell were Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits, George Harrison and Jimmy Buffet! He is also one of the first Hollywood celebs to be busted for marijuana possession back in 1941. Other smokers and tokers of the times include Cary Grant, Groucho Marx, Errol Flynn and Robert Mitchum. He was also a fan of LSD and wrote extensively about his first trip aboard the Good Ship Hip Lollipop when it was legal before most of us knew our ABC's about LSD.
California born in 1906 Lord B was working the club circuit in Chicago by the 1930's and the 1940's. During Hitlers big shindig he toured with the USO to entertain the troops though I doubt much if they understood a word he was saying but had to be a diversion from German Tanks and 88 mm shells bombarding them day and night on the front lines. Buckley had to be better than bombs!
By the dawn of the Atomic Age, Lord Buckley began to emerge, a nuclear mutant comic and poet from the atomic rubble and began playing clubs and performing with music and introduced scat singing into his hip hypodermic needle and used sound effects for punctuation in advance of Spike Jones. Insert whistles and kazoos here!)
One of his favorite routines was to remake Shakespeares Roman characters in his own Buckley hipster image..friends, Romans and country men became "Hipsters, flipsters and finger popping daddies".. and lend me your ears became "knock me your lobes!" His most famous piece is the Nazz..as in Nazareth where Jesus works as a professional "carpenter kitty!"
In the mid Fifties he worked the strip club circuit in Los Angeles and was frequently on the bill with a young raunchy comic named Lenny Bruce. On stage together, if the crowd was stiff and the room hard to work, they would turn their backs on the audience and play to the decidedly hipper band members with appropriate rimshots and lots of drug jokes and lots of between the knees hipster slang that the band got but the audience was left in the dark..and rightly so. Drink up Shriners!!!
Buckley made it to television as a guest on the Groucho Marx, You Bet Your Life Show in '56 as a contestant..the explosive hilarity of back and forth dialogue and banter between Groucho and Buckley is sheer ad lib genius. They later became fast friends. He also created other characters such as Go Man Van Gogh and was portrayed as himself in Beanie and Cecil well after his death with the hipster scat voice provided by Scatman Crothers.
Buckley was hounded by the FBI and drug task forces for years and it all ended at the end of the hip cattle drive trail in 1960 when he had a stroke soon after his final appearance at the Jazz Gallery in St. Marks Place which the police at the city's request closed his show down. He was cremated and you can only imagine what hip strip club with hipster hookers in hipster heaven is getting an earful of Lord Buckley..maybe even the Nazz himself will buy a front row ticket and buy a round of drinks for the band and the strippers. Show time!!! Puff the Magic Dragon (The Troubadour) by Mike Marino
All that bullshit about St. George slaying fire breathing dragons and saving hopeless damsels in distress is nothing more than mythology gone bad, like a beer that's gone flat in a sleazy saloon. The truth...well the truth is mired in the quicksand of nostalgia, times past, times passed, and at times pissed. Pissed at the lack of free thought which was locked tighter than a virgin's vagina in a chastity belt to prevent the fornication of unwarranted free speechof an open minded society and those who cried foul and then cried “Howl” America was constipated...it was time for an enema.
Our story begins where all fairy tales begin...with a Once upon a time. Once upon a time, in the wee smalls hours of the dark ages of 1957 a cloud was hindering free speech in America, but soon the sun began to shine once again. In the tiny village of Los Angeles dwelt not a mystical elf, but rather a 6 foot 6, wild long haired eccentric and slightly deranged anti-establishment wizard named St. Doug in a forest of Hollywood glitz, surrounded by fair maidens all who radiated beauty along with ample amounts of abundant cleavage as seen in carnal celluloid film after film of the merry mayhem of the "days of yore" Busty Wenches all with knockers the size of small castles and drawbridges at groin level with troubadours serenading with songs of love...along with songs of protest against the evil tyrants who lived in the east. The villagers were "beat" and stifled, but the lid was about to be ripped off as St. Doug Weston was about to slay the dragon that held free speech hostage...and once again..the friendly dragon, the imprisoned Puff could roam free.
Doug Weston, born in 1926, was an imposing figure in any city, but in LA he stood out and had the balls of brass only a bull dyke could match. He was a born entrepeneur and free speech advocate and in 1957 opened the Troubadour Coffee House on La Cienega Boulevard, (later it was moved to it's current location on Santa Monica) Seating capacity was 300 and on any given night the audience held a handful of actors, singers, song writers, wannabes and will be's from Dennis Hopper to Jack Nicholson who frequented the club religiously.
Where else in an intimate venue could you enjoy the music of Odetta, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary along with Bob Dylan and other folkies, or as Doug referred to them as "modern day troubadours" It was a gathering place for young folkies and aging hipsters who took a wrong turn at North Beach up north and ended up in So Cal. The stage at the troubadour was a launching pad later for the careers of Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, Cheech and Chong, Joni Mitchell and Steve Martin.
Taking a stand on the grounds of free speech terra firma..Doug booked Lenny Bruce who was already involved in two obscenity trials and Doug knew the cops would be in attendance at a Bruce performance wherever he pulled his "schtick" so to speak, but Doug liked him and his take on society and the cops couldn't bully the man with balls the size of Jupiter when it came to free speech. It was the night of "Tits and Ass" and The Lone Ranger wanting Tonto for "unnatural acts" ...bang..cuffed...busted...Lenny was off and running again to the courthouse but this time with Doug Weston behind him along with many notables from lefty LA...
The ink didn't hurt the gate at the Troubadour from then on either and Puff was riding higher then any dragon had flown before! Eight miles high this time and the Troubadour kept on chooglin' and has remained open since the dawn of free speech time. Others who have launched from the Weston launching pad are Elton John, the Eagles, Van Morrison, Jackson Browne and JD Souther just to mention a few of the fuel injected singer songwriters. Doug who died in 1999 was called the "Godfather of the Southern California singer songwriter movement of the 60's and 70's"
The tradition continues today with a flotilla of musicians that have ranged from Motley Crue to Radio Head. When Weston booked acts just staring out..he had them agree to play again if they got famous but for the same fee they played originally at the Club...it was a clause in the contract that at first was acceptible but later artists fought it and rebelled as radio, television and of course later later..the web had more impact on their careers than that tiny stage that was the launching pad of protest in the dark ages...when one man had the balls to charge ahead and break the chains that were holding many musicians back....with his help..they broker free and of course into the charts and eventually in music history and pop culture.
Doug got more and more laden with drugs and alcohol which took it's toll and his behavior became stranger by any standards and he no longer ran the club on a daily bases and died of pneumonia in 1999. A memorial was held at the Troubadour with performances and dedications
from famous musicians as a tribute to him for his role in the success in so many musicians' careers.
Doug Weston and the Troubadour Club...protest and social commentary...with balls! . The Black Panther and The Red Bear
Somehow without taking a bullet in the back, I had managed to get through Basic Training and AIT. Even though my blood was purple hazed, I was not red, white and blue by any stretch of anyone's imagination, nor am I today. I felt then as now, as red, white and screwed. I have only voted once in a national election and that was back in the 80's and did not cast a ballot for the liberal left (never trust a liberal, only an activist) a liberal will simply bend and blow with the wind and opt for compromise which is not a solution, nor the the over wrathful holier than though right wing of the predatory American eagle, but at least with the right wing, when they say something like Love it or Leave it, they mean it and there is no compromise. They stand fast and at least you know where they stand. The enemy is in plain sight..like the Klan..you can't tell a book by it's cover but you can tell a idiot by his sheet!
No, my vote was for Gus Hall and Angela Davis running on the Communist Party ticket. Davis certainly had an activist pedigree that cannot be denied, and was my way of exercising my "right of free speech" that had been denied to so many voices in the night in this country during the Sixties. The cities were burning, the police were rioting in Chicago and Black Panthers and John Sinclairs White Panther Party in Detroit were being harrassed, arrested and in case of the Black Panthers, murdered for their beliefs and activities. At this point I feel it is important to take a look and a step through the looking glass to examine the people who were the burr under the saddle of the disciples of his holiness, John Wayne.
What happens in the atomic political reactor when you unscientifically split the atoms of two people who share a nuclear passion for societal change? Whats worse, is that each is from a different end of the socio-ethnic spectrum? The answer? Easy, that is when political isotopes go kaboom! A Big Bang, that's what happens!
One of these fissionabe personages is aa real iron range son of a political bitch, born of Finnish immigrants who, like many before them, made their home, home on the range, in and on the Mesabi Range. The Mesabi kimosabe, is in northern "youbetcha" Minnesota. Stout, workahlolic, alcolholic miners. Proud stock, with shirts of proletarian plaid in all colors of the rainbow and Rockford socks (forerunner of Sockmonkeys) to help fight off the winter freeze. Flapping flags of Finland adorn the working class town and the inevitable company store. It's a cacophany of the proud heritage of steely, swarthy workers intermingled with doses of liberal amounts of labor friendly leanings.
The other reactor factor: a fiery young black woman with deep southern fried routes in the fertile soil that was also the fiercely racist real estate south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis would emerge as an inspiring intellectual and passionate proselytizer of peoples rights, making her one of the most vocal of voices of the purple hazed double dazed Sixties that gave shape to a new generation of questioning activists, who believe me, weren't proud to be Okie's from Muskogee. Leave that to the haggard huddled masses that didn't and still don't quite understand that dissent is as American as apple pie, baseball and imposing democracy down other nations throat at the point of a bayonet..now, that's about as American as it gets!
The formidable fornication of socialist philosophy and conviction eventually generated enough politically sexual heat and gravity to bring these two separate orbs into perfect alignment, fusing them together in concise orbits, which in turn lead to the Communist Party's Presidential Campaign Ticket that featured the Red Bear and the Black Panther, Gus Hall and Angela Davis. It was the political equivilent of "Dancing with the Leftist Stars" as the times they are a changin' times produced the all-American dream team of the Communist Party of the USA. It was the birth of the third party political third rail of American politics where the red star of communism wore a hammer and sickle along with a mountainous skyscraper Afro. In effect, Davis was the party's stick of dynamite while mucho gusto Gus added a red tinged hue of Bolshevism to a socialist rainbow of radical activism.
A little background if you please Maestro! Following the no-bullshit Bolseviks takin' it to the streets ousting and elimination of the Czar and his family in old imperial Nicholas Russia (most famous for large fur hats and Faberge eggs!) the left wing of the Socialist Party of America organized the first American Communists with a determination to build support among American workers, support the Soviet Union and of course, the simple matter of overthrowing capitalism. The gospel according the Marx and Engels.
It had been a long time since the American government was afraid of a portion of it's citizenry, (and all governments should be afraid of it's citizens and not the the other way around,) so the United States began a not so land of the free campaign to limit it's dosage of democracy and instead suggested suppressing the "godless" movement that wanted rights for the working class. The gall of it all. The persecution forced them to go underground like bolshevik ground hogs, hoverin in secret cells, which only strengthened their resolve. After a bit of infighting, the new party was unified after a period of ideological constipation and managed to emerge above ground existence with the friction of fractured factions easing up. Then as though someone tossed another log onto the campfire the flames of dissent erupted again in the camp of the comrades, ending in the eventual expulsion of those Hot to Trotskyists.
Gus Hall wasn't always, well, Gus Hall...in fact his real name was a gusher of a moniker. He came marching proudly from the womb in 1910 as Arvo Kustaa Halberg to parents who at the time were involved in the Industrial Workers of the World..or Wobblies as they were known. They were also early members of the Communist Party of the USA as far back as 1919. It wasn't unusual, as those madcap Finnish immigrants were often red hued radicals when it came to political preferences. They tended to be extremely active in labor militancy and political activism. Arvos father had to pay the political piper the price for his leftists leanings, resulting in his beinng booted by the bosses from working in the mines when he joined in the IWW strike. This of course resulted in the diminshing returns of whatever income and safety net that capitalism had failed to provide for in just such circumstances. It's no wonder in those days workers were attracted to communism over capitalism..capitalism tended to have it's citizens bend over as far forward as it could for an economic fucking with the dildo of democracy.
The family then went all from comfortable working class to all out Ted Kacyinski rustic, and moved into a small cabin in the northwoods that Gus's dad built with his own hands. Here Gus lived there as a proletarian version of Davey "The Commie" Crockett. Politically, he was loaded for bear, or "bar" in the frontier parlance of the buckskin and fringe days. With ten in the family to feed, Gus by the age of 15, had to forgoe any formal schooling, and instead rolled up his working class sleeves working to help keep the starving family from sinking below the surface of a hungry ocean. The north woods howled a wolf call to him and Gus went to work in lumber camps, as well as working in mines and on the railroad.
Most young boys are encouraged to join cub scouts or boy scouts but two years before the stock market crash of 1929, Gus was recruited by his father into the Communist Pary of the USA, or CPUSA where he proved he had exceptional organizational skills for the Young Communist League. Now that his commintern internship was complete, it was time for higher Red-ucation, so in a 1931 socialist version of the Sorcerers Apprentice, he recieved an apprenticeship that allowed him to travel to the Soviet Union to study at the International Lenin School in Moscow where he excelled in sabotage (seriously! Sabotage! I wonder who he asked to the Proletarian Prom that year?) He also got straight A's in guerrilla tactics, all part of the curiculum of Three R's, Stalin style...Reds, Riots and Revolution!
Meanwhile, back in the States...Hall moved to Minneapolis and became involved in hunger marches, farmers rights and industrial strikes. The whirlwind of progressive politics caught up with him by 1934 when he was jailed for six months for taking part in the Minneapolis Teamster's Strike, a strike led by that madcap hot to Trotkyite, Farrell Dobbs. Eventually Gus was released and blacklisted which made it impossible for him to get any work under his birth name. So with the flair of creativity with the air of subterfuge, he shed his skin of identification, emerging with his new moniker..Gus Hall...which, by the way, was legalized in 1935.
He moved his activities to Ohio where at one point he ran for Mayor of Youngstown on the Communist Party ticket, and being the patriot he was, or at least ardent anti-Facist, enlisted in the US Navy during WWII and while serving in the Pacific theater of action he was elected to the Communist Party's National Committee in 1944.
While Gus was in the Pacific theater of war, an event was taking place that would eventually put two people on a Communist collision course. Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama in January of 1944. A highly educated and passionate individual her name has become synonomous with the fight for civil rights and involvement with the hyper-activism of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, started in 1966 by Huey "Free Huey" Newton and Bobby "Gag Me Judge Hoffman" Seale. It was group that practiced and perfected militant self-defense of minority communitys against the US government and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizine and community based programs. The agenda was the revolutionary establishmnet of real economic , social and political equality across gender and color lines.
By 1946, Gus was elected to the Executive Board of the party. He didn't exactly have any red letter days in 1948, as that was the year that he was convicted under the anti-communist Smith Act and was sentenced to a five year prison term. So, he pulled a Trotsky and headed SOB, or South of the Border, down Mexico way. While in exile he was elected as the Communist Partys National Secretary in 1050. He was busted in 1951 and given three additional years of prison time. When released in the psychedelic Sixties he worked to rebuild the party to it's former glory after years of decline. In 1968 he tossed his fur hat into the fray and ran for President of the US. Being a liberated soul, he chose a female running mate, Charlene Mitchell but received a little over a thousand votes.
He soon became the red debutante of the new leftist ball and gained a new crop of young activists with the YCL, now known as the W.E.B. DuBois clubs, and among the crop of militants attracted to his orb was a young Angela Davis. Dubois was an intellectual leader of the black community in America fighting racism in the country. He was a scholar, a writer, and was founder and editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis.
Davis whose membership in the Communist party at the time led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the state of California. She was also tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad Brothers 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County.
In the 1980's she and Gus formed the dream team ticket to proletarian paradise twice, both times going down in defeat. By the early 1990's Davis moved away from party communism to other forms of political commitment and she has identified herself as a democratic socialist.
Hall ran the race four more times and it was during one of his campaigns that he uttered the infamous phrase..People Before Profits. His last race before being put in the proletarian pasture was in 1984, but in 1988 he steered the CP into full support for the Democratic party. He felt confident Jesse Jackson would win. In 1991, he led the anti-Gorbechev-Pro CPSU establishmet in the Communist Party. By now his planet was drifting further away in the political galaxy from for allies such as Davis and Mitchell. He did lead the party until his death. He passed awy on October 13, 2000. Halls family recieved condolences from as far away as Vietnam.
It was a red banner campaign where the Red Bear ran with the Black Panther through the jungle of politics, becaming the political third rail derailed by a two party political system that had no stomach for an upstart third party...especially one that espoused "power to the people" and "People Over Profits"..damn it..that just ain't American! Once again the Red White and Blue becomes the land of the red white and screwed!
Then there was the Savio Salvo...the Free Speech shot heard round the world!
The Army Diaries Chapter Six
Free Speech in a Free Democracy is an oxymoron. There is no such thing while encased in khaki and Fuck the Army green that even resembles Free Speech. The protests in the streets against Vietnam were Americans voicing their opinions against such brutal incursions in another nations affairs. Especially a "war" war that we inherited from the French. We have bailed the French ass out of disaster from World War's One and Two, and Vietnam. They are not a fighting people. Wine and Romance maybe, but never go to war with a troop of French soldiers. It has defeat written all over it. Now..gimme some North Vietnamese and a couple of Turks and Israeli's and I'll attack Moscow...again...France tried that too and froze their Naploeonic ass off as they went running home to Paris with their tail between their legs. That's teh problem..too much tail and not enough balls...but enough of the French, please...America! Ah, freedom, for corporations sure. Individuals don't amount to a bean counters hill of beans while balancing the social and political books.
While in Okinawa, we were visited by Vice President Spiro Agnew and once by Bob (Don't get me started) Hope. Neither of which I cared to see or meet or greet anyway, but the military in it's wisdom confined a few of us who were labeled political dissidents who might voice their opinions as a lot of us did, to the barracks area. We were not allowed anywhere near our M-16's either (a gun has a free speech pattern of it's own)...gimme a break..do I look like Lee Harvey Oswald? Out to whack a comedian and a crook? I think it was that Okinawa was in such close proximity to the Red Giant of Red China across the short expanse of the South China Sea, they thought with my connections on the Pacific Left Coast I could somehow mind meld with Mao and thrugh psychic free speech, give him exact co-ordinates of where the USO stage would be and Hope would be napalmed..c'mon..I know Mao says "Political power comes from the barrel of gun" but why waste a USO troupe that includes scantily clad dancers and a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader or two, all showing enough thigh you'd think their legs were the Empire State Building. If that were the case then I would be King Kong (not Viet Cong) and make my way to the top and then, call me a believer, It WAS beauty wot killed the beast!
Mario Savio fired the first free speech salvo over the heads of straight America from a verbal cannon on a California campus. Youbetcha...that was the Savio salvo heard 'round the world. That one particular speech galvanized a generation in much the same way as the Howling Ginsberg or the road weary Kerouac did in the era of the Beat Generation, but, few know about this prophetic proselytizer who charged into the free speech battle on the front lines with an arsenal of verbal grenades, along with Mario in the trenches, though on different battlefronts facing off with the "enemy" were the likes of Lenny Bruce, who proclaimed to one and all that "to" is a prepostion, "come" is a verb.
Mario hit the spotlight, center stage in an era that America found itself beginning to shed it's conservative Fab Fifties paranoia of the Red Scare, and the baby boomers were coming of age. The old paranoia's were being transferred from the parents fear of the Red..to the childrens fear of it's own Red, White and Blue. Bob Dylan was blowing folk music magic dust in the wind and Lenny Bruce was a schtick up artist playing bawdy rimshot tits and ass shows in burlesque houses from the Sunset Strip to North Beach in San Francisco. Mort Sahl was urbane, and fired with a single shot to hit it's sociological target while Lenny Bruce used a shotgun blast of profanity to test the limits of endurance..in the end..Sahl was mortified!
Retro backstep to 1958, student activists organized SLATE, a campus political party, to promote the right of student groups to support off-campus issues. In the fall of 1964, student activists who had traveled with the Freedom Riders and worked to register African American voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer project, set up information tables on campus and were soliciting donations for civil rights causes. According to existing rules on campus at the time, fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs.The yin and yang of the continuing failure of the American two party system to function for the people, of the people and by the people of the land of the Red, White and Screwed. This was further proof of that ongoing malfunction.
There was also the residual air of Red Scare Big Brotherism, as a mandatory loyalty oath was required of the campus faculty, which had led to dismissals and ongoing controversy over academic freedom. (Loyalty to the government to me is treason, loyalty to the "people" is democracy!) In September of 1964, Dean Katherine Towle announced that existing university regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues would be strictly enforced. This particular piece of real estate was until then thought to be city property, not campus property.
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a direct result of all these new restrictive and somewhat facist impositions and exploded into a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 on the Berkeley campu under an informal leadership of a body of activist students. In protests unprecedented at the time, students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.The runaway free speech train was on a non-stop collision course and there was no turning back at this juncture.
Stepping into the spotlight was "true believer" -Mario Savio. Mario was the blue collar son of a Sicilian steel worker, born in New York in 1942. Within 22 years his voice would not only lead a generational movement but his would be the voice that opened the floodgates on an entire body electric called "the free speech movement" letting loose the wild verbal mustangs as they broke out of the corral of formality in Berkeley in 1964. His podium could be everything from the steps of Sproul Hall on campus to the rooftop of police car. It was an age ripe to rip from it's face the phantoms mask that disguised the "odious operation of the machine!" He was raised a devout Catholic with all it's cathedrals and holy catheters. Mario was involved in the early Civil Rights movement and eventually ended up at Berkeley. Although his activism was activated in the deep south during the era of the fight for civil rights, his super nova protest exploded on the Berkeley campus in October 1964 when former studen Jack Weinberg was manning a table for CORE. The university cops put Weinberg in a cop car when someone from the surrounding crowd yelled out..."sit down", and Savio along with others began a 32 hour sit in..that's when he hopped atop a cop car and worked the crowd into a frenzy with his speech. But it was December of that year that launched the first real Savio Salvo heard round the world.
That volley was the "Bodies upon the gears" speech to 4,000 assembled on campus..which led to the arrest of Mario and 800 others where Mario proclaimed.."There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." The Free Speech Movement was now full tilt boogie. Eventually in 1965 Mario quit the FSM as he was disappointed with the growing gab between the leadership of the FSM and the students themselves.
America..democracy...free speech for all... yeah right, no left..yeah, left..it's a reality alright, for all, except those who truly have a voice and can make a loud and clear impact and stir the emotions and jumpstart activism. This country does not mind one iota if you are a mental deficient and can't speak in whole sentences, like most newspaper readers and journalists, but .... but...if you have a voice, a real voice that scream from deep within the well that is you, well, well, if that is you, the FBI is not far behind you waiting for you to bend over before they pounce and gang rape your rights. Forget about soap on a rope in the jailhouse shower your fair game and tasty meat. Savio was "summoned" to the FBI Berkeley office after he had quit FSM. They claimed they had threatening letters that were directed to Mario, but in true Hooverian melodrama refused to speak while Mario's attorney was present. Mario instead criticised the FBI for failure to make arrests and take action in the deep fried southern south where human rights were being violated everyday. The meeting ended faster than early ejaculation.
Mario, was a highly passionate and educated individual who held a variety of jobs. Not all requiring the brain of a rocket scientist. Marriage was in the cards for Mario as well, in 1965 when he married a free speech movement activista and they both bid adieu to Americo, doffing their sombreros to the ghost of Woody Guthrie, and off they went to Jolly Old England. Mario, it seems had won a scholarship to Oxford. While in England, the Savio's had a son, Stefan, but, things were starting to fall apart for Mario as emotional problems began to surface from the bottom of his pysche's ocean floor, and exact a toll on him. By 1966 the Savio's en masse moved back to the Left Coast and the Peoples Republic of Berkeley. By 1968, Mario got all mainstream politically and decided to run for state senator from Alameda County on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, but, lost to one of those pesky wimpy liberal democrats that always screw the skew for die hard activists by diluting the message and cater to the centrists. It's the political equivilent of watering a guys drink down in a bar and charging him full price.
The Free Speech Movement had long-lasting effects, sort of a radical left westie hangover after boys night out on the Berkeley campus and left it's indelible marks as a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement in America. It was seen as the beginning of the student activism that existed on the campus in the 1960s, and continues to a much lesser degree today..much lesser today, non-existent!. Everything that goes up, however, must come down, or, for every action, there is a reaction. The reaction this time was a substantial voter backlash against the players involved in the Free Speech Movement. Ronald Reagan, yep, that one, won an unexpected victory in the fall of 1966 and was elected Governor...to the left that was akin to snapping a wet towel against some naked jocks ass in the locker room. Ray-Guns first order of the day was to direct the UC Board of Regents to dismiss UC President Clark Kerr because of the perception that he had been too soft on the protesters. The FBI had kept a secret file on Kerr. Hell, they probably have one on you two. If so, be proud! Besides I don't trust many people who haven't spent time in jail.
Mario, in 1980, decided to return to the ivy vined towers of tweed, wool and academia at the university at San Francisco State, four years later he received a summa cum laude lawdy lawdy miss clawdy degree in physics and snagged his masters in 1989, and then moved to Sonoma County where he taught mathematics, philosophy and logic at Sonoma state university.
Paranoia strikes deep as the song goes, and sometimes, most times in this so called democracy of ours it is a justifiable fear that creates a wall of resistance to this "land is not your land", "this land is not my land,"America. The purple mountain majesty, is stripped and found not to be so majestic at all but loathesome. In the case of Mario, it was eventually revealed as the 20th Century was coming to a close, that Savio had been trailed, tailed, spied and lied about by the FBI. This ghost shadowing began the moment he had climbed on to the police car that harbored Jack Weinberg on that Berkeley campus in 1964. It was at this point that the wing tipped depraved departmental mental minions of J. Edgar Hoover were salivating over Savio in an effort to bring in an orchestrated movement of anti-Savio salvation to the nation. If only Mario were homosexual, he would have been better off. Hoover would have overlooked his politics, in fact, would probably have invited him to bed in the Rotunda, or at least engaged in a rousing round of odious machine masturbation of Savio's speeches.
Mario was followed for more than a decade because he had emerged as the nation’s most prominent student leader.There was no evidence that he was a threat or that he had any connection with the Communist Party, but the FBI decided he merited their attention because they thought he could inspire students to rebel. Dammit America, someone has to lead and this country hasn't had any leadership from the White House in years, and yes, that includes the "mighty" Great White Hope, Barack Obama, who has decided to let Bill Clinton run the country in his absense.
Mario was on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's illegal counterintelligence program ivestigation finally ended at the beginning of 1975 and at that point an investigation into the FBI’s abuse of power began. Savio’s ex-wife, Suzanne Goldberg, said that the "FBI’s investigation of her and Savio was, a waste of money and an invasion of privacy."
Mario time card was about to be punched. He had a history of a weak heart and after a life of high octane visibility it began to wear hime down. He was admitted to the hospital in Sebastopol on Nov. 2, 1996 where he slipped into a coma on November 5, and he died the following day after being removed from life support. The voice of a generation was silenced and the odious machine still grinds away to this day, but not without some modification thanks to Mario Savio, Lenny Bruce and other advocates of Free Speech in America. Remember to celebrate true democracy..it's alright, and legal to burn the American flag..what better way to celebrate a legacy.
The Savio legacy lives on on the campus at Berkeley. The Sproul Steps which was the proletarian pulpit of student activism in the Sixties are referred to as The Mario Savio Steps, and grab a latte laddie and lassies, The Free Speech Movement Cafe is open and the walls are covered with murals depicting the times, feeling and mood of the revolutionary Sixties and the Berkeley Campus..ground zero for Free Speech and the battleground where the first Savio Salvo was fired in a free speech shot heard around the world. They also serve soup and sandwiches and most foods are organic, what else would you expect?
The Army Diaries - Chapter Seven After my purple hazed Army daze I was a leftist machine. Still am and proud of it. I'm jumping ahead here as I feel it is important to bring my at the time future into perfict orbit with my at the time present. My arrests and trials brought more arrests and trials in civilian life. A carry over from the active duty of active military service. You see, after serving in the military in those days, I have no idea what it is today, they also want you to spend time in the reserves going away for weekends adn two week long periods in the year to play soldier..soldier...I played it for real in Asia and they wanted me to join ROTC college pukes in Grayling, Michigan playing Ike. I refused and didn't go, besides that weekend was one of the largest peace marches in Detroit to protest the war.
I was heading up a theater group in Detroit at the time producing plays by local writers with local actors, and the plays and the players were a tad left of Karl Marx. The Detroit Red Squad would harrass our troupe during our rehearsals at Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Detroit. The same church that allowed the local communist party to hold a rally in the auditorium so naturally, Detroit Red Squad didn't have far to go. I was arrested for not appearing in the reserve camp..went to trial in Federal Court and because my plays and my writers plays had a social message, a few of them and we were raising money for a drug rehad center, SHAR House, and the Mayor was on our committee...and noted civil rights lawyer, Ken Cockrell..we went to trial..Ken and company, the mayor behind me, and a list of character references from the head of the art institute to the president of American Motors..in a nutshell...to have me attend the reserves would take me away from my theater presentations and the fund raising efforts of a local drug rehab center, thereby..it would be ...ready..this is cool..a Detriment to the Community of Detroit...whoo hoo.
My civilian protest involvement also included hanging out at venues and concerts with White Panthers, socialists and others who shared a love for hues of red, shades of red, and where the MC5 would Kick out the Jams...damn..Kick out the Jams Mother Fuckers!
That was the purple-hazed, double-dazed battle hymn of the 1960's. The Late Great Altered States of America. The Red, White and Screwed. It was an era that ripped the bra off of Lady Liberty to reveal her falsies and hypocripsy. Meanwhile, "Kick out the Jams" was resonating from deep within the bowels of the Motor City from the stage of the Grande Ballroom. It echoed throughout the concrete canyons of a youthful hipster America. The Grande, for those who may not know it, is to rock n' roll what the tomb of Jesus is to christians, except a much cooler and louder place!. It was a great time to be alive, stoned and crazy.
It was a musio-politico warning shot fired over the head of a disheveled establishment. The tattered flag that represented a faded American dream was emerging from the chaotic mushroom cloud of Flower Power. The Sixties brought about the assasination of two Kennedy's and a King, not to mention a law and order police meltdown during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. Vietnam was a raging drunken bulldyke in a baddass biker bar on too many bennies and dexies, and with too much to prove. The Black Panthers and Angela Davis had "gone to the top of the mountain" too, and realized it was the perfect spot for a sniper.
"Free Huey" and "Burn Baby, Burn" had become the new bestselling militant mantra, pushing "We Shall Overcome" from the top of the Civil Rights pop music charts...and the hits kept on a'comin'. A gagged Bobby Seale sits at the defense table during the Chicago Seven trial where Judge Hoffman judged Abbie Hoffman and his merry band of pranksters, hipsters and Yippee lost boys. Michigan had spawned the Students for a Democratic Society on the heels of the Port Huron Statement, and from that seedling, sprang the Weathermen...and by the way, you really don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. In Detroit and the neighboring People's Republic of Ann Arbor, John Sinclair and a cadre of blue collar artists - slash - bolsheviks formed The White Panther Party, a group in spiritual alignment with the Black Panthers. San Fran-freakin'cisco had Haight Ashbury, New Yawk had the Village and Detroit had a small pisser of a bohemian ghetto known as Plum Street, artists, headshops, too much sandalwood and intense patchouli incense, panhandlers and rag tag student neo-revolutionaries from Wayne State and pants pissin' winos from the Cass Corridor...That was the backdrop...now the players.
The Motor City had it's unholy share of madmen and rock n' roll Rasputins. It was the rock hunting grounds of Her Leather Thighness, Suzi Quatro, the Amboy Dukes, Frigid Pink, the Stooges and Frost. The brothers Hodge, Dallas and Catfish. The radio station of choice was WABX, home of Dave Dixon and across the river the Canadian eh, airwave ballbuster of CJOM with it's no hold's barred middle finger attitude to the American Woman across the bridge. The Fifth Estate newspaper was the only paper worth stealing and 12th Street was ready to boil over with snipers, tanks and the National Guard, as race relations reached below sea level lows that erupted in a rage with looting, shootings, beatings, and a city left scarred and scared..it was the home of rock n' roll. It was bar bands, garage bands and basement bands. God created this rock n' roll universe in six days...on the seventh he rested but not before he created the MC5 and built the Grande Ballroom.
The Grande is the quintisential Igrid Bergman of rock venues in the Motor City. Just enough erection causing sex appeal , style, grace and Ilsa elegance, ala "Casablanco" that was built in 1928 with the ballroom located on the second floor. Jazz bands improvised as Detroits elite swarmed to over capaicty to the ballroom, boppin' and jazzin' and finger poppin' into the Thirties. Then along came Bennie Goodman and the other big bands whose sound filled the cavernous ballroom with a bobby sox sexuality. In the Sixties, Russ Gibb took over and started booking bands from Jeff Beck to Cream and everyone in between. Bob Seger and Ted Nugent plying their rock trade alongside the top acts and the other local acts that comprised the Detroit rock n' roll scene, but one band came to epitomize the mucho grande days of the ballroom Grande....The Motor City Five.
The Motor City Five added an element of fuel injected energy and high octane creativity to a highly combustible mixture of rock and revolution. The turbulent Sixties were fueling the band with left-wing politics and a penchant for psychedelics, the Breakfast of '60's Champions. Bizarrely, or not, the group made the cover of the highly coveted Rolling Stone Magazine (in the days it was worth reading) without having an album out. Their on-stage antics, pitbull approach to convention and their outrageously high-powered hi-amped energy paved the way of their reputation with the effectivenss of a bulldozer clearing a rain forest. The were loud, and they were proud. They had energy to spare and you didn't have to be an Einstein to figure out that E=MC5.
In the beginning there was rock n' roll...Wayne Kramer and Fred "Sonic" Smith were high school friends and guitarists who played in several bands at sockhops which were the rage of the day before the days of rage. By 1964, the Motor City Two, were now Five with the addition of Michael Davis on bass, Dennis Thompson on drums, and a singer with a voice that seemed to erupt from a very angry volcano, Rob Tyner. Tyner originally was going to be the bands manager but didn't care for that aspect..can't get laid being a manager, eh? So he tried out as the bass player, and failed miserably. So as is inevitable in rock n' roll, the one who is the least talented musician, becomes the singer and front man. If Phil Spector built the Tycoon of Teen "wall of sound" then Tyner and the Five created the rock n' roll wall of heavy metal iron and steel that was a natural musical spawn from the blue collar-unionized autoworker City of Motors.
Enter..stage far left. The Lone Socialist Ranger in the persona of John Sinclair who would take over the duties as "manager" for the group and use it effectively to spearhead a cultural revolution through raw high energy rock n' roll. Sinclair was one of the first Marxist multi-taskers if such a thing can exist. He was head of the Detroit Artists Workshop, anarchists and artists working towards a gentle world of peace, art and anarchy. His militancy grew over the years, and he, along with others, formed the White Panter Party as the vanilla extract to the Black Panthers. The Five/Sinclair marriage lasted a few years with the band getting more revolutionary by the minute as they and Sinclair spiraled through the helter skelter Sixties, the decade that had a societal deathwish and would climax in death and disallusionment with not only the establishment, but itself.
The stage is set....
There was the Haight ...there was the Village...and in Detroit there was Plum Street. Plum Street was the envisioneed Bohemian art colony smack dab in the middle of middle america in the middle of the middle earth of the Motor City. Shops, artisans, a gentrified community unlike the rucksack roadies that were crossing the continent. Haight Ashbury, Colfax Ave in Denver and the Village had evolved over the years, a fine wine aging in an oak cask. Plum Street, in typical Detroit fashion was "assembled and manufactured" and rolled off the assembly line in 1966 with fanfare and the goddamn mayor of Detroit officially opening it! How fucking revolutionary is that? It was capitalism and commercialism trying to sell new Cadillacs in a used car lot. Yes, the artists came, yes the tourists came, and yes, the "hippies" came and were, (ready for this shit?) Persona non gratis as they did what they will do and did in those days...you know, "Spare Change?" You have to remember, Plum Street was a fake, it was not a real "woman" but a drag queen on a runway strutting her stuff, attractive maybe, but not the real deal.
April...1967...just months before the summer solstice and the flower powered Summer of Love, the psuedo-hippie scene of Detroit emulating the San Francisco Human Be-in, decided to stage a love-in, which in the blue collar votex of Detroit is an oxymoron. Let's face it, Detroit was never the sensitive type. Detroit, Rock City! Detroit, Murder City! No sissy Seattle here amigo.The "Love Locale" chosen was Belle Isle, an island playground smack dab in the middle of the Detroit River with a bridge from Jefferson Ave taking visitors to it's gardens, outdoor grilling pits, decorative fountains, aquarium, dance emporium and yacht club. The same bridge that Harry Houdini did his appendix bursting underwater escape trick from.
One of the groups playing that day was the MC5. The park was packed, the rolling papers kept rolling along, acid was dropped and music filled the park with thousands of weekend hippies, artists, musicians, bikers, hipsters, squares and narcs. Narcs in the parks was a mainstay of the Sixties. As the sun began to set with the city skyline framed in the foreground, the cops were getting restless..oh, oh, bad sign. The polizia, on foot and mounted troops stormed the crowd to move them off the island, back across the river, back to Jefferson Avenue but apparantly they weren't moving fast enough so batons were raised, heads were cracked, and all hell broke loose as the cops went anal on the "anarchy" before them.
The Outlaw motorcycle gang was also on hand and there were instances of members of the brotherhood beating up bystanders. During all this, businesses on Jefferson Ave, including the restaurants locked their doors. Liquor stores on the other hand didn't fare as well with windows smithereen'd and bro's Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker made there escape to the streets. The crowd of close to 3,000 was finally dispersed by 9:30 pm. Sinclair rationalization claimed that all the real hippies had left before the melee and the problem was caused by wannabe's and police. The MC5 had experienced their first head knocker riot, but, more were waiting in the wings on the turbulent horizon just months away, August actually, as the Motor City became an occupied city.
Detroit has this peculiar habit, religious in nature me thinks, of setting itself on fire, overturning cars, and looting. Sports mainly will be the gasoline to fuel the flames...Piston pumping win on the court, Red Wings victory on ice, Detroit Tigers ballpark win, doesn't matter. Like a Bhudist monk in Saigon, it decides to torch itself to celebrate a victory or bitch and moan about defeat. In late summer, 1967, it was a street rampage bonfire that ignited on 12 Street. Cops were in the habit in those days of harrassing anyone with long hair or black skin. In the city, a blind pig was raided by the infamous "Big Four" which were separate groups of four cops who fancied themselves Texas Rangers or some macho fraternity of law and disorder who roamed the inner city neighborhoods of Detroit checking identification of people who may just be standing around, They would arrest people in squad cars, or trump up charges on an individual, pulling one magically out of the hat, or cop helmet in this case. In a few cases, the Big Fours tactics led to the outright murder of three people during questioning. A teenager, and two prosititutes, all shot "while attempting to escape the back of a squad car". Police honchos bought the act, lock, stock and gun barrel, with a sly wink.
The blind pig raided was merely a group of black citizens hosting a welcome home party for two returning Vietnam veterans. The cops expected a dozen people to be on the premises, easy billy club pickens, but, instead there damn near a hundred of these mo'fo's. Shit...Calling all cars, calling all cars. Gotta have backup, right? The cops burst in roughing up the patrons, things started to get out of control and before you know it, riots break out. It was Dresden during the fire bombings. as the city flicked it's Bic and went up in glorious technocolor flames. Cops shot at looters, and snipers shot at cops and firemen from rooftop nests as the city and the police went schizoid with a synapse that snapped. The National Guard (the weekend warriors from the farm) were called in, along with Michigan State Police (glorified meter maids) and eventually the White House wanted in on the head busting action and ordered the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne to the scene. Christ, it was the Tet Offensive in reverse. Tanks rumbled through the streets, martial law was in force, and at the end of the 5 days the tally was 43 killed, 1,100 injured and over 7,000 arrested. Today, 12th Street has been renamed...Rosa Parks Boulevard.
You can't blame this one on the MC5 or even John Sinclair. They were in town, yes, and living in the city, yes, so they were witness to the flames and brutality. In an interview Wayne Kramer relates that he was arrested during the riots as he had a telescope in his apartment window downtown. The cops saw it and busted in, cracking heads and opening them up like so many cans of Spam. Kramer was arrested as the cops claimed he was spotting uniformed targets for snipers. Incoming!! This was the Fives second encounter with a schizophrenic Demon-ocracy not taking it's meds. The MC5 and John Sinclair were now in the rifle sights of a paranoid establishment and were the poster children of the dreaded Red Squads that kept lists of "enemies of the state", a phrase borrowed from Josef Stalin no doubt, but it was the year 1968, the Chicago Year of Daley that would make all other riots pale in comparison and place the MC5 on a government hit list, marked for commercial death.
1968. The Democratic Convention in Chicago. There was a euphoric elation lifting the spirits of the younger generation accompanied by a sense of real change in the air, optimism for the future, and an arrogance on both sides of the line drawn in the generational sand. The chant of "Make Love, Not War" drowning out the Om! of Merle Haggards, "Love It or Leave It" Okie mental illness that affected an older generation with hardhatitis "my country right or wrong" philosophizing. Jerry Rubin, Uncle Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, yeah, the list goes on and on of the participants and syncophants involved. Anyone who was anyone was there. Terry Southern covering the convention for left wing periodicals, but the scene that stands out is the live telecast of regular guy journalista, Dan Rather being carted off, unceremoniously from the convention floor, with an appalled Walter Cronkite giving a blow by blow commentary. Mayor Daley of Chicago was glaring at the podium in a classic case of a Political Portrait of Dorian Gray whose time had come and gone. Outside in the park the crowd was getting as restless as villagers ready to storm Dr. Frankensteins castle to kill the Promethian beast the mad doctor had created...so with pitchforks held and decibels cranked up high, the band played on.
The MC5 were scheduled to play a free concert outside the convention hall, and they did amidst the amok and the chaos.They had been invited by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to kick out the jams, and kick them out they did, right in the balls. Just as they were finishing the cops moved in and the Five began removing their equipment as fast as they could. Having been through many riots before, they didn't need a crystal ball to know what was next on the "to protect and serve" agenda. The MC5 have the distinction of being the only band to actually perform a free concert amidst the melee and police riot that subsequently defined the American meltdown of the American wet-dream, and many were now thinking of bullets over ballots. The revolution was on....or so we thought.
Following the Demo-debaucle, the MC5 clicked their revolutionary Red slippers (There's No Place Like Home) and returned to Detroit and the familiar sanctuary of the Grande. Elektra Records was now interested in the band, so they sent a talent agent to hear what they had in a live performance, (along with the Stooges) and in the end signed the Five and Iggy Pop both to the label. Their first Elektra release is the now classic "Kick Out The Jams" which was recorded live at the Grande in late '68 and because the record company felt they sounded better live, decided to release the live version. Of course there was a matter of Mother Fuckers...so the dreaded, castrated AM radio version that turned Mother fuckers into Brothers and Sisters won out...ok, so it was a compromise...it's hard to foment revolution without a top ten on the hit parade. Fuck Karl Marx and his manifesto, and Mao's Little Red Book...gotta make Billboard Magazine first.
But wait...not another fuckin' riot. New Yawk this time, and a riot by any other name...not on the scale of the Newark or Detroit riots...not near the benchmark set in Berkeley at Peoples Park and the gassing on Telegraph Ave. but a riot all the same if you please. In New York, Bill Graham, rock empresario without peer had opened the Filmore East to compliment his original Filmore in the Filmore District of San Francisco, now unfortunately re-named, Filmore West. A group calling themselves the East Village Motherfuckers were the American version of Amsterdams Provos, without knowing it, and had talked Wild Bill Graham into setting Wednesday nights aside as "community night" with free shows for the panhandling proletariat who roamed the beat streets of the Village. Bill, said yes, and even had the MC5 play a freebie for the community. Elektra, the MC5 lable wanted to showcase the band to a more affluent record buying crowd so they in turn booked the Filmore (real American cash money) on a Wednesday, yes, community night. Now that was a page torn from How to Piss-off an Already Pissed-Off Mother Fucker 101. The MF's, never really a cheerful lot to begin with weren't happy and stormed the Graham Bastille. (I know, more villager visuals for the reader to consume)
Bill stood his ground outside the auditorium and refused entry, in a stance reminiscent of Gov. Lester Maddox standing in a southern academia doorway brandishing an axe handle so black students couldn't enter a white school. Next thing you know old Bill is hit with a chain by a Motherfucker who breaks his considerable nose. Inside, the band is kickin' out the jams with Motherfuckers in the audience who had crashed the party, and when the Five finished, the maddening crowd storm trooped the stage trying to rip off the Five's gear as the band itself bolted out of the Filmore as fast as their power to the people legs could run. motherfuckers in hot pursuit, roadies mixing it up in the fray, a carnival call of Hey Rube goes up and all hell breaks out. Then it happened. Two limo's appear for the band...limos? Revolutionaries...fuck...the crowd went nuts. Wayne Kramer tries to explain MC5 and White Panther theory while the crowd gets more hostile and come at him with knives just like a scene of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. Kramer does get out alive with a little help from his friends, but unfortunately, Bill Graham thought it was Rob Tyner who swung the chain at him, it wasn't but it didn't matter, this was Graham and he had more clout than God...Graham had the band blacklisted not only at his venues but within his secret society circle of promoters who made the rules and had the decoder rings to prove it.
The Five had released their album and waited for success to come a'knockin' at the door. One of the places that the newly released album was to be available was in the bands hometown mondo-monstro department store, J.L.Hudsons, the venerable merchantile dominatrix that ruled the downtown Detroit skyline on Woodward Ave for decades merchandising whip in hand. Hudson's was the equivalent of the Mall of America in it's day in the Motor City, and in fact, the Hudson family were the backers of the famed Hudson automobile including the NASCAR darling, the Hudson Hornet. Hudsons sponsored the annual Thanksgiving Parade that would cruise down Woodward from the Institute of Arts into the city center, past the Vernors bottling plant where Detroiters for decades could watch ginger ale being bottled as they gazed through giant windows. Motown had moved it's record studios from it's ghetto nest to the more prestigious Woodward Ave...all culminating in a dramatic waterfront as Woodward ended at Jefferson Avenue exposing the freighter bearing Detroit River just across from the Canadian city of Windsor.
Hudsons was the record store of choice for Motor City rock n' roll rebels. Elvis dominated the racks at one time and now it was time for the MC5...hometown, homegrown favorites to take their place on the Rock n' Roll Rack of Fame at the gargantuan Hudsons. Well, not quite. Seems the white collar sensitivities of the buying department at Hudsons, didn't take to the overtly blue collar, anarchistic war chant of the band, and the release was deemed...obscene which in itself was an obsenity. The underground press and emerging FM radio stations such as the revolutionary WABX which broadcast from downtown Detroit took the battle of the retailer to the press and the airwaves and the Five took out a full page ad in The Fifth Estate underground paper with the simple message..."Fuck Hudsons" Can't say for certain how effective it was, but today, ask any young Detroiter about Hudsons and they'll give you a blank deer in the headlight state...ask them who the MC5 were and at best you'll get "Oh fuck yeah, Kick out the jams, motherfuckers" although they will still miss the point. Let's face it, this generation is not of a rebellious nature, but if they ever do reinstate the draft I guarantee they will put down their Playstations and face it or fight it. Might even hear a chorus of Country Joe's Vietnam Rag.
It was a bit too much for Elektra, so they dropped the band faster than hot merchandise, but, they were picked up by Atlantic, who somehow thought they could make a silk purse out of this rock n' roll sows ear but that wasn't to be either. Their releases failed to chart anywhere near acceptable and the material was turning commercial which the band didn't like. Their political-managerial alliance with John Sinclair was changing too. The band was beat, and Sinclair was about to make the blunder of his life by getting narc'd. It was only a matter of time.
John was busted for giving two joints to a narc. The result was a sentence of 9 and a half to 10 years imposed on the imposing White Panther. In 1971 a glitterati of leftists music luminaries assembled in the great Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor for the Free John Sinclair Rally. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were there, and in fact the song "John Sinclair" (10 for 2) is on the "Sometime in New York" album. Rockin' Robert Seger was there, as were folk artist Phil Ochs and Howlin' poet emeritus of the beat generation, Allen Ginsberg to name but a few. Within days of the rally, the Michigan Supreme Court overturned the Sinclair sentence and from then on, the white knight was talking backwards as Ann Arbor held it's hookah high. Soon, marijuana laws were decriminalized in Ann Arbor, (many thanks to Zolton Ferency and the Human Rights Party), and combined, all these events led to the present day Hash Bash held on the U of M campus each year in academia's version of the Grassy Bowl Conspiracy. Thank you to both John's and Zolton.
The MC5 planets were no longer aligned in perfect chaotic harmony. The times were changing faster than a pit crew at Indy changing tires, the bright red of revolution had become a faded pinkish punkish hue and the war in Vietnam was only escalating and the music hadn't brought the Pentagon to it's knees. Drugs began to push to the forefront of the bands quest for the holy rock n' roll grail, and as politics became less, well, political to them, the drugs took front and center stage, forcing the band into the background and relegated as the opening act of the comedy of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, and oh yeah, by the way, a blast from the past...the MC5.
One of the tours they did before the final splitting of the MC5 atom was in Jolly Olde across the pond to the land of the Ripper, God Save the Queen, the Union Jack and a jerkoff gang of UK Teddyboys at Wembley Stadium. Fifties wannabe rockers with peg pants, bowling shirts and enough fuckin' grease to last a week in the state penitentiary. There were 50 thousand plus in attendance, and not in a mood for the new look of the Five and began pelting the band with beer cans and other hurled missles from the audience...Tyner, ever the Detroiter, began tossing them back into the audience and that was all she wrote..the band escaped from the stage and the stadium and headed back to the "sanity", they thought, of their beloved home turf, Detroit.
Nixon captured White House in 1972, the same year the MC5 said "fuckit" to the music industry. Touring and drugs wearing them down, no commercial successes and dropped by two labels will give you a complex in due time. So in true Five fashion they decided to give a farewell concert at, where else? The Grande, the scene of so many past grand MC5 performances. The farewell show was pretty much a no show as far as packing in the SRO crowd. They were offered $500 for the gig. The crowd was sparce, 250 if that, Kramer got pissed and mid-set walked off the stage and the Five Horsemen of the Rock n' Roll Apocalypse had disappeared in a nuclear flash. It was the musical version of "Death of a Salesman" the MC5 now rock n' rolls Willie Loman.
Today, the defunct Five in retrospect are regarded as gods, as well they should be. John Sinclair lives in Amsterdam as a gentle poet who at times rambles incoherently to anyone who will listen anymore. The White Panthers became the Rainbow Peoples Party and by now, all of them are run of the mill Democrats. Bobby Seale schlepps BBQ recipes, Abbie Hoffman is dead and Lennon was assasinated.
The music scene as a whole sucks today with no MC5 or Ramones or Flamin' Groovies or New York Dolls on the horizon to salvage what's left of rock n' roll. The revolution never got off the ground full speed but did make a dent in the establishments armor. The generation today is not interested in protest, in fact compliance is the mantra, not defiance. Just once I would like to here a presidential candidate stand and the podium and instead of saying things like "We must work together as one people to make a stronger America, my fellow Americans"..just once, with a wink in the candidates eye as he or she looks into the camera, smiles to the American public and says...."My Fellow Americans...Kick Out The Jams Mothrfuckers!!!
Chairman Mao
John Lennon