‘Words convey meanings too,’ I shouted, ‘and fresh ideas.’
‘Not yours,’ he smirked, scratching away at the artboard.
‘Maybe not, but Oz is attracting wonderful writers.’
Mart’s jab at my prose was true – the harder I tried, the less it sounded like me. Maybe that’s why I became an editor in the first place; a way of writing by proxy. I couldn’t draw, act, play an instrument or even choose a decent shirt. ‘If only I could sing,’ I once boasted to Sharp, strutting my hips, ‘I’d be Mick Jagger.’ Mart had rolled his eyes.
His cheque book lay on a chair and I flicked through the butts – Chelsea restaurants and record shops, as usual. Mart fitted his spidery headline over the photos: Plant a Flower Child.
‘That’s it?’
‘What else?’
I mentioned ads, letters, articles – ‘The politics of protest. The war, racism, abortion . . .’
He stubbed a Gitane into Steppenwolf. ‘Man, you’re being left behind. Open your eyes.’ The twins dropped their flowers and climbed into Sharp’s bed. My eyes were open all right, and so was my mouth. He bent over the record player. ‘And your ears.’ A track from the new Beatles album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, filled the room: Lucy in the sky with diamonds . . .
‘What’s all the fuss?’ I asked, loyal to the Stones.
‘Haven’t you listened?’
‘Bits and pieces, Mart.’ I couldn’t afford to buy all the hot LPs.
He said there was much more happening on Sergeant Pepper than in Oz. ‘Do you get the initials?’
He wrote them down. ‘Oh shit, really? Do they use that stuff?’ Hoots from the dark room. I could not envisage myself ingesting a mind-altering chemical. Martin produced a pot of tea.
‘You could print something on the back of the poster,’ he conceded, ‘if you insist on words.’
‘Thanks. For a start – how about the logo and price?’
More ideas were tossed around. If a thousand shots of flower twins heralded the Hippie Nation, maybe a ‘send-up’ of its opposite would suit the flip side. And that, of course, was Straight Society – work, boredom, grey suits, sexual repression and gook-killing. Sydney Oz had once published an exposé of ‘The Great Alf Conspiracy’, a satirical alert to the cult of short-haired nine-to-fivers who ‘killed more people in automobiles than any other ethnic group’, and were keen on praying, drowning and getting engaged. This could be updated into a poster, turning Oz 5 into an integrated political tract; a declaration of war on Norman Normal Nation, soon to be history. Martin topped up the tea.
‘This is the first decent cuppa you’ve made me in your life,’ I said. Come to think of it – it was the first cup of tea he had made anyone in his life. Mart was taking his time to adjust to the demise of the servant class. Suddenly, my teeth felt itchy.
Sharp picked up a copy of IT and read from the editorial: ‘No matter how many arrests the police make, there can be no final bust, because the revolution has taken place in the minds of the young.’
‘Wow.’
Sharp kept reading: ‘It is impossible to define this new attitude – you either have it or you don’t.’
‘Wow.’ Why was I saying wow? The sun shafted through the skylights. The advice from IT rolled on. About permissiveness – how each individual should be freed from the hindrance of external law and internal guilt in the pursuit of pleasure, so long as it does not impinge on others. The ultimate problem of the future was the conflict between the right to pleasure – ‘orgasms’ – and social responsibility. Ours was not a movement of protest, apparently, but a celebration, which ‘caused envy and created enemies’. The key attitude was Pleasure Now. ‘If our ideas are quashed in the future’ – Sharp recited with relish – ‘we can look back on the ball we had now.’ His hair shimmered in the sunlight, he was Moses reading from the tablets.
‘Wow.’ Giggles floated from the bed. The twins had become quads, no, sextuplets, lying in each other’s arms, flecked with petals, nibbling at each other’s ear-lobes. Bob Whitaker bounded from the dark room with a pile of twin-prints and dumped them on the desk – why did he look like a chimp? I felt a chump. Sharp handed me the Underground paper, pointing to a para, the words springing to life as a singing telegram: ‘The new thing is people just coming together and grooving. If you don’t know what grooving means then you haven’t understood what’s going on . . .’ My heart was racing. I muttered, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’ The walls of the studio started to breathe, inflate, shrink, along with the pop-surrealist artworks. Everything roared. Finally it hit me.
‘WHAT DIDYA PUT IN MY TEA?’
8
BUTTONHOLED OUTSIDE a LAV
In August 1967, an Underground press legend landed in London. In the early Fifties, John Wilcock had co-launched the Village Voice, the progenitor of modern subversive journalism. One of his quirky columns began: ‘Everyone is Assumed to Be an Ally: a friendly wave, a handshake and any help that’s within my power to anyone who wants . . .’ This ran counter to the hard-boiled cynicism of satirists and social critics. In Sydney, Germaine Greer had scoffed, ‘Why syndicate Wilcock? He’s all wet.’ A view which seemed to be shared by his colleagues at the Voice, who elbowed him into the cold.
John moved on to edit the trail-blazing offset tabloid East Village Other (EVO), which in turn inspired the creation of IT.
Through my window, when I saw him knock on the door, I thought he was from the gas board. Wilcock was wearing an off-white nylon business shirt and grey trousers, with the cuffs frayed at the edges, as though he hadn’t changed since his days as a cadet on London’s Daily Mirror.
Plonking himself on the unmade bed, he extracted a cigarette from a pack of Rothmans and cut off the untipped end. ‘A joint?’ His accent was mid-Atlantic. Louise took a puff and drifted off to Kensington Markets. ‘I don’t smoke,’ I said, ‘go ahead.’
Machine-rolled joints in a Rothmans pack, he explained, were an infallible method of smuggling grass. John had fallen out with the owners of EVO and now published his own newspaper, Other Scenes, from wherever he happened to be. While I brewed the tea, John complained about London.
‘It’s so docile. Everyone’s so goddamned polite. They’re told to line up and they line up.’
‘After Asia,’ I said, ‘it’s refreshing. No one lines up in Bangkok and it’s hell.’
‘But Londoners always do what they’re told – no matter what. You can’t even stand on the sidewalk and look at the passers-by without being busted for loitering. If you want to strum a guitar in a park, you need a licence. You’re even told how much bread you can take out of the country.’
These cranky words belied his demeanour. John’s face was perennially cheerful, while his voice was a colourless drone, which never varied, no matter what he was saying. ‘And now they’re about to ban pirate radio. It affects thousands of listeners, but the English don’t care. Busybodies and killjoys, most of them – jealous of anyone else doing what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.
The BBC was about to go pop, I countered, even employing the same DJs, so maybe it wasn’t such a big deal.
‘Everything that affects freedom is important. You don’t get it without a fight – that’s what the Negroes have finally realised.’ He asked about Black Power. ‘What’s this Michael Abdul Malik like – Michael X?’
‘The black agitator? Haven’t met him.’
‘And you call yourself an editor?’ John picked up the phone. A few minutes later we were on a 32 bus, wending our way to Camden Town. From a calico saddle bag he distributed copies of Other Scenes to the passengers, who skimmed through reports of love-ins in Atlanta and avant garde art shows in Paris. A plastic gadget like a stapler clicked in his hand. On ad displays, the back of seats, windows – any surface he spotted – John left behind a trail of adhesive tags with the Other Scenes logo. As we neared the nerve centre of black militancy, my apprehension grew.
Michael Malik’s rhetoric
was scary and his reputation mixed. A former enforcer for a notorious slumlord, he now threatened to drive all whites into the Thames. As the door of the rundown mansion creaked ajar to our knock, a bald black face, like an emu egg wearing sunglasses, glared from the crack: ‘Yeah?’ It was Joe, the bodyguard.
He led us into a rugless room, furnished with a mismatched jumble of chairs. Scowling figures in dark cloaks and the obligatory bumblebee shades thumped the hall. Wilcock reloaded his sticker-gun and jabbed the Other Scenes logos on to a cracked windowsill, as I stared gloomily at a poster of Stokely Carmichael haranguing a crowd, watched admiringly by Michael X.
‘Stand up,’ ordered Joe. After a frisk, my first, we were led to meet the boss. Mr X sat cross-legged on a bare floor, looking as fragile as fairy floss with a wispy beard and skin distinctly lighter than his henchmen. I set up the tape-recorder.
‘You’re such a small percentage of the population,’ Wilcock began, dispensing with preliminaries, ‘both here and in the States. So how can you expect victory by force?’
Michael Malik had heard it before. ‘Our struggle is international. And you’re vastly outnumbered.’
‘But blacks can’t move across borders,’ I said. ‘My own country has a colour bar, so you could never unite with the Aborigines.’
‘And in the States people are armed,’ John added. ‘Whites could shoot every black they felt like.’
‘The strange thing about my race,’ Michael X countered, ‘is that in the white Western world we always live in the cities. It only took twenty men to flatten Watts; eleven to stop Detroit. I could halt London with six. Obviously we can win.’
‘Yeah – right on.’ It was Joe at the door, his fist clenched.
But he couldn’t hold the cities for long.
‘It’s not the point of holding something. It’s stopping a machine that has gone insane. The system is driving us as a people completely insane. I too am being dehumanised . . .’
Wilcock asked why he didn’t co-operate with radical whites to create an alternative political party.
‘To begin with, any party that calls itself radical white is no such thing – it’s just a pack of vicious white men who sit and intellectualise and do nothing. The only people we can talk to are the hippies. They too want to ignore the system.’
‘Hippies?’ The proposed alliance was intriguing. Hippies were usually denigrated as apolitical. Sharp’s fluorescent poster Oz – ‘Plant a Flower Child’ – had incited mockery from soapbox Trots. All the more so for being sighted in boutiques, mounted under spots. ‘Hippies want to create something new,’ I said, ‘but your rhetoric is pretty bloodthirsty.’
‘I appreciate your frankness. I like a white who makes himself clear. As clear as the Ku Klux Klan.’ A compliment. Most whites spoke in riddles. ‘Our mob has been working at all manner of strange things in a nonviolent way with the hippies, but the national press ignores that.’ He cited the London Free School, set up by Hoppy in Notting Hill, to which he had lent his support. And Release, a new drug-bust organisation, with twenty-four-hour access to lawyers, which he claimed started up in his office. ‘Rap Brown works with hippies in the States and I work with them here. There is a degree of mutual understanding and trust.’
A woman entered with a tea tray, which she lowered to the floor, her tight leather skirt bunching over her hips. ‘Hi. I’m Winhamie,’ she said, as I tried to avert my eyes from her smooth dark thighs.
‘Surely if we all fucked each other,’ I suggested, trying to show I was a bit of a hippie, ‘the race problem would cease in a few generations.’
‘That’s a very wild and silly fantasy,’ he said, tickled. ‘Harold Wilson doesn’t want his son to go fuck the pygmy girl I know in the Congo and your Queen Elizabeth just doesn’t turn me on. There will always be white, black, yellow and all manner of strange shades. The key question is whether I can remain a nigger – that’s what I am – and at the same time relate to you. Can we establish a talking relationship, a working relationship, a loving relationship? That’s important. Because if I have to become another white man on the inside, in order to relate to you, then it’s hopeless – I will be driven to evil.’
It was difficult not to be charmed by Malik, even if it was a performance – his lilting Trinidadian accent, his bodyguards, his dreams of a global black alliance, his whole spiel. Michael X was another immigrant trying to refashion himself in tune with the times, wanting to make waves, to make a buck, to make a difference. Like so many of us.
As he showed Wilcock and me to the door, I put a final question. ‘You once said that in a riot, you wouldn’t recognise any individual white faces – would you recognise a hippie?’
‘I’d see the flowers in their hair,’ he laughed, ‘and I’d hear the bells around their necks.’
For the sixth Oz we teamed up with Other Scenes. It was a seminal issue, sparking arguments that would rage for years.
‘The gangsters of the new freedom are already mopping up your kids with narcotic drugs and drivelling pretences of fake revolt,’ wrote Gerson Legman, who predicted that ‘all real revolt, emotion and art’ would be siphoned off into degeneracy, to preserve the power of the state. David Widgery, the med student attracted to and yet appalled by Oz, concurred. ‘At the moment, the hippies in England represent about as powerful a challenge to the power of the state as the people who put foreign coins in gas meters.’ As for legalising pot, Widgery believed this would change nothing except the duty roster of the Drugs Squad, and that Britain would ‘proceed untouched into the Stagnant Seventies and the Awful Eighties’.
While our rival, IT, lauded the alternative world, Oz scratched its head in perpetual ambivalence, like its editor. Even the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing, while credited with a ‘brilliant set of speculations into schizophrenia’, was condemned for his ‘hotfoot retreat into irrationality’.
The new issue, using a variety of coloured inks and layouts designed to dazzle, ranged across the avant garde and alternative arts scene, with snippets on politics and the media. We showcased the latest censorship: the banning of Picasso’s anarchist play in St Tropez; the tribulations of the erotic publisher Maurice Girodias; the sad story of Jean Straker, a Soho photographer, whose lifetime collection of arty negatives had been seized by the obscenity squad.
Two pieces in particular showed how widespread and entrenched the hippie revolt was becoming, whether or not it was intrinsically ‘fake’.
Neal Phillips, a contributor to the pot-smoker’s bible, The Book of Grass (Penguin), had been arrested by the Greek police for hash offences. ‘Who is in charge of you?’ they asked. ‘What are your plans? Where is your headquarters?’ From jail, Phillips smuggled a grim exposé of the Greek judiciary under the military junta, written in counter-culture bebop: ‘People can play the tourist here if they wish, but every coin helps perpetuate this black jazz.’ With graphic tricks and spot colour, his piece fluttered across a double spread as a defaced Greek flag.
The Oz guide to taking LSD, by US writer Chester Anderson, began, ‘All drugs are dangerous’, and was rich with seasoned advice on how to wring the most out of a trip – avoid crowds, restaurants and introspection, do it with someone wiser, take a bath. ‘The most important hour is the one before you pop the pill . . . don’t let it become the biggest thing in your life.’ On it went, making an acid trip seem more of a slog than most jobs. Its cautionary intelligence (don’t deal, don’t use needles, know how to terminate) stood out in a tabloid climate of shock-horror mythology, where even the Sunday Times fell for rumours of acid heads staring at the sun till their eyes exploded. It was an overdue service for our readers, who, for the most part, were tripping in the dark, as I had been the day that Martin Sharp had spiked my tea . . .
Finally I had made it through the Doors of Perception into the Summer of Love. King’s Road became a catwalk for the demimonde, and I traipsed behind the tripmaster, trying to blend with the Beautiful People. Men with buccaneer boots and phosphorescen
t faces waved from the Picasso café, looking like they took LSD with their cornflakes.
‘You could have asked me,’ I moaned to Martin.
‘There was no other way. You’re full of excuses.’
As a matter of fact, I should have been picking up a cheque from the distributors . . . ‘Hey Mart, look.’ A framed copy of the golden Oz gatefold glittered in a boutique window, and I puffed my chest.
‘You were frightened of that issue,’ he said, striding along in his three-piece cobalt-blue velvet suit, with two-toned brogues and odd socks. A Gitane stuck to his lips, he resembled the super cool New Wave dreamboat, Jean-Paul Belmondo, whom he had once played in a student flick. We whirled past Hung On You, where groovers didn’t mind paying triple for a floral chiffon shirt because Mick Jagger had probably bought one like it the day before. Psychedelic strangers beamed as if they had discovered the key to the universe – why hadn’t I? Mart was muttering the refrain from Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. Something’s happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?
Somewhere, sometime, Martin led me across a vacant lot that suddenly turned into a bombsite. ‘I’ve just had a flash,’ I said, trying not to sound like Mr Jones. ‘I don’t think I’m a very nice person.’
‘No – You’re not.’
‘Wow.’ This was deep. A tramp in silver boots sat in the rubble playing a trumpet, and I burst into tears.
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