The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Because, frankly, it’s about time they made their move. It shouldn’t have to fall to guys like me to tell them their shackles have been struck off. Or will they wake up only when guys like me demand our ribs back?

  37: 22 AUGUST 69

  Oh my, no sooner am I back in town, back writing the column, promising it won’t be skipped again (after which, promptly, the very next week, it’s skipped, thereby doing a gaslight number on my poor head), than I’m in trouble once more. How do I seem to offend you all? It’s really uncanny! There’s no telling what casual comment will outrage some ethnic group. It’s enough to make a guy clam up and stay out of the line of fire. In fact, I can dig why all the scuttlefish refuse to “get involved” and speak out; hell, without even trying to piss someone off, you can have an entire social stratum down sucking the marrow out of your bones.

  This time it’s the WASPs in my readership who are properly annoyed, because with all the civil rights action going down, they’re the only group a commentator can bum-rap, without having himself protest-marched. Two weeks ago it seems I made sort of an offhand crack about the “alleged” existence of something the communications media call “blue-eyed soul.”

  Sort of Ajax-clean nitty-gritty Fights Back. Or something.

  It all seemed pretty funny to me—honkies trying to horn in on what is clearly a black product. I didn’t think anyone took it seriously. But here come de mail, here come de mail, and I get four letters from WASPs in Tuston, La Canada, Glendora and (this one I don’t even believe, it’s gotta be a made-up) the City of Industry, all of which accuse me of being a traitor to my pigmentation because I won’t credit Whitey with having soul. (Man, I was blown away! I didn’t even know those people out there had gotten shoes yet, much less learned to read! I mean, if they could read, then they must have seen there were other names on the ballot than Reagan or Nixon.)

  So I’m all ready to drop a fragmentation item in this week’s edition about how those kindly folk out there should take not just this column, but the entire Freep—both sections—roll it into a tight funnel and jam it up their blue-eyed soul. Feeling very smug, was I. Until I bought Tony Joe White’s album, hoping some of the other cuts would be as heavy as Polk Salad Annie, and found out that down home voice was coming out of a good old boy who looked like a Florida redneck. Second biggest aural shock of my life. The first was finding out, about ten years ago, that Mose Allison was white.

  So already I’m reeling, right?

  Then I turned on the Johnny Carson thing a couple of weeks ago, August 5th to be precise, right after the column with that remark was published, and had my smug mind crinkled like Alcoa-Wrap. (You probably didn’t hear it, what with all the shrieking in the land from the NarkDepart moving its families here and there. Personally, I chuckle and gloat at the beautiful inhumanity of it. Let them know what it’s like to be naked and harassed. Don’t try and make me feel bad because the Freep pulled their covers and “inconvenienced” them. I can’t work up any sad about undercover finks having to move to new lairs and eyries, maybe sweating out a freako phone call or two. Now they know how the rest of us feel. We get the freako phone calls all the time. And worse. The “inconvenience” to the narco squad and their families doesn’t seem to me one one-millionth as inhumane as the years spent in reform schools, county jails, penitentiaries and other gaols by kids whose worst affront to their society was taking a toke of grass. When marijuana is legalized—as it most certainly will be when Liggett & Myers, et al, find they can’t advertise traditional cancer-sticks on tv; a certainty I gauge as inescapable when considered in the light of the information that L&M has copyrighted the words “Acapulco Gold”—when the powerful tobacco lobby in Washington gets behind grass in a sort of “joint effort” yuk yuk—who will repay all those kids for their ruined lives? Who will take their fingerprints out of the FBI files? Who will erase from their minds the memories of the smell of piss and disinfectant from how many lockups and drunk tanks? Who will put them back in college and make up the years they lost on the way to their B.A. or M.A.? Who will lobotomize the crime data they picked up in the slammer? Who will apologize for witch-hunting them, and treating them like criminals for a “crime” no worse than that perpetrated by every member of our parent’s generation who sipped a teacup of Cosa Nostra bourbon in a speakeasy, 37 years ago? Who will pay reparations when pot is legal? Who? No one, that’s who the bloody hell who! So I conceive of the Freep’s publishing that secret list of nark addresses and phone numbers a courageous and significant gut-punch in the dirty war for justice. Beside that, dirty trick though it may be, the renting of new apartments for the secret police seems like a mere bagatelle. None of which has to do with the main topic of this week’s column, but I felt compelled to get on the record, particularly after I spoke to a student group at Cleveland High School, out in the Valley, last week, and was called to task for the Freep’s “inhumane act.” So now you know where it’s at for me. Back to the Johnny Carson Show, and blue-eyed soul, and what I started to say a while ago.)

  There before me was one of the mythical creatures of all time—akin to dryads, hobbits, smoke ghosts and leprechauns—a chick with blue-eyed soul. This kid was called Elyse Weinberg, and she went about three points further toward gut-level than either Janis Ian or Buffy Sainte-Marie. She isn’t as funky as Janis Joplin, she isn’t as gothic-moded or genius’d as Laura Nyro, she isn’t as gravelly as Judy Henski, she isn’t as heavy or as gorgeous as Lotti Golden, but would you believe she puts Joan Baez and Judy Collins away proper?

  So I had to re-gear my thinking—which is happening much too frequently these days for any security at all—and I had to wonder how and why such blue-eyed sisters as this Elyse chick and Laura Nyro and Lotti Golden and all the others suddenly came trumpeting on the scene. And naturally, I blamed tv for even this largesse: what else would you blame, in the Age of McLuhan, for everything from smog and violence to Elyse and the Dutch Elm Blight?

  Where has this chick been? I asked me. And from the slag-heaps at the rear of my skull, a voice screamed, “You shmuck! Don Shain at Tetragrammaton Records told you this broad was dynamite two months ago, and he even sent you her record, and you stuck it up on the shelf because you were going out of town, so why don’t you take it down and listen to it?” So I did, and you know, high pressure Shain was right: she’s even heavier on records than she was on the tube. (The reason for that will close out this column and lead into the next, so bear it in mind.)

  Where this chick had been, of course, was getting born. She didn’t spring full-blown with a voice like that out of nowhere, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. She was twenty years of shit-pop-music in the making. She is a natural reaction to Patti Page and Doris Day and even Jeri Southern. She and Lotti Golden and Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro are the female equivalents (coming on the scene a little later than their male counterparts) of Mose Allison, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and most recently Tony Joe White. They were the men who studied not Julius La Rosa or Buddy Greco or Tony Vale, they were the ones who listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Lemon Jefferson and B.B. King. They were the ones who understood that the true voice of American Music was not in the phony cabaret idiom, the big-cufflink-whiteonwhite-shirt idiom. It was the sound of the black man with passion and verve.

  And they revolutionized the sound of today. Granted, they followed Otis Redding and James Brown and Wilson Pickett out of the ghetto into Motown and Staxmoney villas, but they laid down the highest tribute…even the Britishers. They said this is the real sound. And now the women have done likewise.

  Elyse Weinberg and her white sisters are paying the highest tribute to Big Maybelle and Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey. They are singing with the voice of the land. And they are saying to television that twenty years of proffering Dinah Shore and Lawrence Welk and Dean Martin is all they’re going to give. They are saying that the Lennon Sisters and the King Family don’t get it no more. They are saying that if there’s going to be truth in the
land, it’s going to come first, as an example to others, in the songs and the singing.

  Yet somehow television cannot comprehend the simple reality of such a situation. They still program prime-time hours of (such upcoming wowsers as) Leslie Uggams, the Lennons (presented, god help us, by Jimmy Durante!), the King Family, Dean Martin’s Golddiggers, all the Vegas lounge acts—though the supreme nadir was reached when Sandler & Young, two Mafia rejects with voices as compelling as fishmongers suffering Cheyne-Stokes breathing, were given their own summer hour. They manage to ignore the enormous purchasing power of the young, whose taste in music run more to Stevie Wonder than Glen Campbell; they still trot out those dyspeptic old firehorses, and wonder why they aren’t selling the depilatory and now-beverages.

  But Lotti and Elyse and Janis and Laura are making all the waves, and the day is rapidly approaching when they will be freed from the slums of tv, the afternoon lip-synch dance shows, and will even put Diana Ross and her glitter scene to shame.

  They will dominate. But not if they are treated the way Elyse Weinberg was treated on the Carson Show, hosted by Flip Wilson; which brings me to the lead-in for next week’s column. I’ll start with Wilson and the shameful manner in which Elyse was shunted on and offstage…and while I’m starting with Wilson, I’ll proceed onwards and downwards with some observations about, uh, er, nigger comedians. But you’ve gotta understand…some of my best friends…

  38: 29 AUGUST 69

  So we’ll understand from the outset just where I stand in this terra incognita of racial identity, paddies and jigaboos being what they are, let me take you back back back through the veil of time to Chicago, 1961. Rainbow Beach. You probably never heard of it. Little shit strip of land on the scungy Lake Michigan shore. Landed gentry, all white, naturally, decided they were not going to follow suit with all the other beaches in Chicago, were not going to integrate. No black allowed. So, also naturally, the blacks decided to stage a swim-in. God only knows why anyone—black or white—would want to swim in that crud-infested water, but they did. (As a matter of fact, it might well have solved the entire race thing; no matter what color you were when you went in, you’d be green when you came out.)

  The ancestors of the Blackstone Rangers came out on a Sunday with weapons, and were met by white street gangs. It was brutal. Nobody won. Lotta heads got dented.

  The following week, everyone in Chicago knew there was going to be worse trouble on the Sunday coming. The South Side ghetto was an armed camp. Spade cab drivers rode around with loaded shotguns on their laps. White cops went in threes. Nobody in Highland Park wised-off to his Negro help. Lorraine Hansberry wrote a poem. James Baldwin got sent in by Time to cover it.

  I went out on the beach. My sentiments went with black. I was there to aid and abet the swim-in. Riot started. Oh boy. Got my skull fractured by a black with a tire iron, got my rib cage sprung by a white with a length of chain. You see, the trouble was: I was gray.

  Now you know where I’m at? Good. Just so long as we understand that your faithful columnist stands four-square for Justice, Decency, Equal Rights and All That Good Stuff.

  Because what I want to rap about this week is, mainly, nigger comedians.

  (I can just hear Lenny Bruce back there, affronted, saying, “Nigger? Nigger? What kind of a cheap hook is that? Jesus Christ, does he need cheap sensationalism to get their attention? Nigger!?! God, what bad taste!”

  Okay, so you’ll call me a kike and we’ll call it even, and we’ll move on.)

  What leads me into these observations is the tail-off from last week’s column, wherein I commented on the abominable treatment afforded singer Elyse Weinberg on The Johnny Carson Show, hosted by black comedian Flip Wilson. (No, scratch that. Knowing what comes next, let’s refer to Wilson as a mocha comedian. Black connotes strength, even in coffee. Mocha is diluted, weaker, softer, ameliorative. Yeah, that pins Wilson for me. A mocha comedian. Light tan, with three lumps.)

  How it happened was this: Elyse had been scheduled for the week preceding, but Carson got to rapping with some banal ex-vaudevillian, and time ran out. So Elyse was promised for the next night. She never showed. They shunted her around like REA Express. The following week, with Carson on sabbatical, and Wilson doing the turn, Elyse was slotted.

  On a show distinguished by its paucity of talent (even the incredible Joe Tex was gawdawful), Elyse was bucked back and back and back till they managed to squeeze her in between a couple of pimple commercials. She did one number, no backdrop, perched on a stool circa Andy Williams 1965, showed none of the fire or verve so handily available on her album, and with a smattering of applause (as much as due a trained seal act), she was blacked out. It was ruthless treatment of a skillful performer, and if anyone conceived of that shot as furthering a career—forget it. But, annoyed at having watched that entire dumbass show for three and a half hours, just to see Elyse, and having been short-shrifted, I did derive one benefit: it exposed Flip Wilson to my penetrating gaze for a protracted period.

  And, Elyse now passed into obscurity and last week’s column, let me deal with the estimable Mr. Wilson, as a manifestation of his times.

  For openers, he’s about as funny as a ruptured spleen. Now, I am by no means calling for a return to Amos ‘n’ Andy—though they had the saving grace of being genuinely funny—but I’m observing jaundicedly that aside from Cosby and Dick Gregory, the last ten years of struggling for equal rights for blacks has produced a strain of handkerchief-head shuffling comics of the Flip Wilson/Scoey Mitchell sort that demeans the dues paid by millions of their brothers.

  The genre comedians—Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley and others—still get denied prime-time exposure (unless you call Pigmeat slapping the Laugh-In cast with his famous pig bladder exposure), while the mocha comics slurp up the gravy with weak-wristed routines that present to the Honkie Mass a picture of the black man as little better than the good-natured, kinda dumb Uncle Tom we all recognize as thirty years out of date. Oh sure, every once in a while Wilson or Mitchell will make some fairly safe social comment about the Detroit Riots or looting or bigotry, but they are de-fanged comments, bearing none of the genuine rage we know lies in the worldview of every rational black man. They are the bought comedians. They are neither black nor white, but a colorless, emasculated something else. They have opted for show biz, for the phony camaraderie of the klieg lights. They have copped-out on their people and their destiny.

  I cannot watch Flip Wilson and his breed with anything but contempt, even though I understand the glittery appeal inherent in belonging to that select little circle of stars, superstars and semi-stars. Nonetheless, it’s a cheap in-group reward, a mess of pottage exchanged for dignity and responsibility to one’s own kind.

  Hell, Lenny was white, and he took more risks with his material in defense of the black man than Wilson or Mitchell or even Nipsey Russell has ever taken.

  How it must gall a guy like Dick Gregory, who can’t get booked on a major tv show, to see a hankie-top like Wilson hosting the top night-time talk show, playing the biggest clubs, working the lounges in Vegas, copping top bread for routines as simpering and approbation-seeking as the worst shuffle ever displayed. What must Gregory think, a man who lays it on the line as he does—for instance—in a new two-record set called Dick Gregory: The Light Side: The Dark Side? We hear the genuine humor of the black man thereon; we also hear his rage, his hatred, his frenzy, his demand for a better life…not only for blacks, but for poor stupid rednecks and even the rest of us provincial, terrified scuttlefish who walk through Spanish Harlem after midnight.

  What does Cosby think of these others? He seems to be a man who has not deserted his people, who pours time and money and effort back into the black community. What does he think about those routines Wilson twinkles, in which the new cliché of the black man is tendered?

  In Mario Puzo’s brilliant novel of the mafiosi, The Godfather (which I recommend to you unreservedly), the second- and third-generation Sicil
ian-Americans refer to the old-style caricature capos as “Moustache Petes.” What do the new blacks, the Clarence Williams and the Hari Rhodes, call the Flip Wilsons? What name is Scoey Mitchell given by Greg Morris? Does Otis Young identify with his soul brother Nipsey Russell?

  How nauseating it is to realize that the cunning racist society in which we move has once more manipulated its opposition. If you can’t take the gun and the hate away from the black man, then buy him. Give him prime-time shots, give him Harry Cherry suits and good living, and he’ll prance around on the set telling the white community that the nigger is still impotent, kinda silly, and just downright grateful to be allowed to loot and pillage and burn every once in a while, in exchange for the amazing benefits of the Great Society.

  Flip Wilson did a week on the Carson Show. I didn’t watch him more than once more, just to see if my perceptions were consistent. He did it the next night, too.

  During WWII they had a name for guys who sold out. The informers were called Quislings.

  I wonder if Dick Gregory knows that word. He might mention it to his black, er, his mocha brother, Flip. We honkies haven’t the right to say it. Shit, we haven’t even got the right to be disgusted by shmucks like Wilson. All we have the obligation to do is go out on Rainbow Beach and get our ribs banged in. Even for jerks like Wilson.

  I’m getting angry. Forget it.

  Next week, at long last, my Rio contact has managed to smuggle out that dope on dictatorship-ruled tv in Brazil. Watch for it next week.

  39: 19 SEPTEMBER 69

  History refuses to allow me to keep my promises, which annoys not only me, but you readers as well. The promise: I wouldn’t miss any more columns. How broken: last week, no column. Cause: history. Explanation: I’d promised at long last to do that column on the state of television in Brazil, a column I’d been planning since my trip to Rio many months ago. It took this long to get the information smuggled out. And no sooner had I written the column, a week ago Monday, than all hell broke out in Brazil, as your other newspapers told you, and I pulled back the column to rewrite it, to get it up to date. And missed my deadline. I’m sorry. And here, totally revised, and quite a bit longer, is the column.