Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  ‘Guevara spelled right?’ the printer asked, as he mounted the plates. I checked with the Guardian. Fine! Roll the presses!

  It wasn’t until I was back in London that the blunder was discovered. The ue of Guevara was transposed. Bugger! Oz would be the laughing stock of the left and I had no one to blame but myself. I retreated to bed with a migraine – for three days. Louise tried everything from Aspros to remedial tomato soups, finally summoning Andrew Fisher.

  Andrew, a fellow Australian, had flung himself into Oz from the start, steering us through the legal formalities of running a publishing company. A law graduate from Sydney, Andrew was working on a play, and scratched a living with part-time legal work, and such things as co-writing my Eleventh Hour ‘Neville Reports’. A noted hypochondriac, he enjoyed sharing in his friends’ illnesses and advising them during their crises. He was calm in the teeth of a storm. When the suppliers of paper stock threatened Oz with bankruptcy, he discounted the invoice and fobbed them off with a series of postdated cheques. ‘Forget the Guevara howler,’ he urged, ‘our readers will be struck by its ingenuity of design.’ Bob Hughes had already dropped by the basement to sing its praises.

  And Andrew had been singing the praises of Bob. Andrew’s former girlfriend from Sydney Uni, Danne Emerson, had landed on his London doorstep with expectations of marriage. She was the feisty Viking who had sparred with Germaine at a party. Andrew now lived with another woman and was terrified of shortly having to show Danne the door. At the last minute Robert Hughes came to the rescue, inviting the Dane to dinner. It was a triumph – the Nordic knockout had boned up on Bob’s book, The Art of Australia, and soon after, the two tied the knot.

  In his dress, politics and party manner, Andrew Fisher’s style was conventional, but his sense of the erotic came from another planet. He had attached himself to a cluster of orgiasts, spearheaded by a manipulative South African painter, whom none of the Oz crowd could stomach. On our cross-town journeys to distributors and paper suppliers, Andrew recounted stories of debauch in the Bois de Boulogne that made my hair stand on end. It was the part of the alternative lifestyle which held his interest the most – sex and lots of it. As wild and weird as possible.

  Distribution of Oz beyond London proved difficult. The anti-white spleen of Michael X enraged the wholesaler in Exeter. The Manchester warehouse ‘disliked the tone’ and dumped us. Despite their handling of girlie mags, Continental Exporters judged Oz ‘far too risqué’ for Paris. In Piccadilly, street-sellers were officially cautioned by police for peddling ‘obscenity’. A carton of coal-tar soap was delivered to the basement, dispatched by a father of a St Paul’s boy, enraged by the slur on his school. Then the department of Customs and Excise claimed we owed them a fortune.

  The flower-child Oz was subject to a 27.5 per cent poster tax. As was the Oz containing the Guevara poster. We insisted that the innovations of Oz did not violate its basic identity as a magazine, and that such a liability would sink us. ‘We don’t give a damn’ was the nub of the official reply, and we printed it.

  Caught up with administrative hassles, I left Martin Sharp and our designer, Jon Goodchild, to press ahead with Oz 9. To my embarrassment, it was devoted to flying saucers. ‘How can you indulge your intergalactic delusions,’ I asked Sharp, ‘when Asia is a bloodbath’?

  ‘There are far more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than dreamt of in your philosophy.’ In the end, I let them indulge their hallucinations, figuring it was the unpredictability of Oz that made it special.

  To redress the balance, the next issue focused on the ‘Pornography of Violence’. Our reports ranged from the torture chambers of Greece to the death pits of Arkansas jails. Frames from a popular US comic strip, ‘The Green Berets in Vietnam’ (predicated on the certainty of victory), were juxtaposed with shots of US soldiers committing atrocities. On 30 January 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet offensive, a simultaneous wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam. ‘What the hell is going on?’ demanded US celebrity newsman Walter Cronkite, ‘I thought we were winning this war’. A photo from Saigon flashed around the world – the gun-to-the-temple execution of a Vietcong suspect. Sharp splattered this image with bright red ink, put it on our cover and penned the line THE GREAT SOCIETY BLOWS ANOTHER MIND.

  Richie Walsh used it for Sydney Oz. His issues had not gone psychedelic, but the content was acid. Oz broke a sensational story about the Archbishop of Sydney, Hugh Gough, who had relentlessly reminded his flock that youth ‘wallowed in a mire of immorality’. Well – we did our best. Archbishop Gough, as it happened, was caught wallowing in a mire of adultery – on a cruise ship, no less – and sent back to Britain in disgrace. The Sydney media suppressed the story, until Francis James, now the Oz ‘religious correspondent’, blew the archbishop out of the water.

  Richie Walsh flew into London on a student junket. He was as garrulous and lovable as ever. And he was married. Soon after Sharp and I had left Sydney, Richie had the good fortune to meet a soulmate of rival precocity, Sue Phillips, who had first entered the Arts Faculty at the age of sixteen. For a belated bucks’ night out, Mart and I took our friend off to UFO, where he was stunned by the light shows and the substitution of music for jabber. For the first time in his life he expressed a desire to take a drug – LSD. Sharp sifted through the trip dens of Chelsea, eager to initiate the young husband, but was unable to score. Ever after, when the Sydney Ozes landed in our letter boxes, distinguished by their monochromatic starkness, Mart would mutter, ‘If only I’d been able to get hold of the stuff’.

  The trees along Palace Gardens Terrace burst into leaf. On Sundays, Louise and I strolled to the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens and watched the kids mucking about with their boats. Kites fluttered. Manfred Mann hit the charts with ‘Mighty Quinn’, Cream with ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ and the Beatles with ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Our street-seller, Felix Dennis, came to the basement and danced a jig. He’d been pushing a hundred Ozes a day. Simple: ‘I set myself up in King’s Road with three chicks in short skirts and ram it in the punters’ faces.’

  Now he was dripping with silver, and wanted more product. So I made a deal – fifty/fifty – and he could subcontract. The sight of hirsute youth at strategic locations, with Ozes under their arms and bells around their ankles, doubled as a promotional device. Louise and I were delighted with Felix – his energy, his commitment and his roll-up-yer-sleeves enthusiasm for any task that came his way. Plus a novelty – he wasn’t Australian.

  A new kind of paper stock was on offer. One side was gaudily dayglo, the other gummed. We selected it for the front and back cover of Oz 11. Sharp transformed the sheets into thirty eye-damaging, detachable stickers, individually perforated. Readers were asked to paste them up all over the city: Black is beautiful . . . Vietloon . . . Norman Normal . . . Eternity . . . Cannabis . . . Om . . . Oz . . . Love . . . Don’t pay taxes . . . Guerrilla warfare of the mind . . . We are lepers, give us bells not degrees . . . Abraxis . . . Speed kills . . . We are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams . . . If I could drive you out of your mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know . . . Between Chelsea and Notting Hill, these cryptic stickers shone from hoardings and phone boxes, reassuring us of a loyal readership.

  It was a schizo Oz. Despite the fluorescent calls to arms on the outside, the inside was a parody of the New Statesman, devised by disaffected contributors, including Tom Nairn, David Widgery and Angelo Quattrocchi. This sober throwback to our heritage was well received in Hampstead, but must have baffled the utopiated flower children of Fulham. A single shop steward calling a strike at a factory advanced the cause of humanity, certainly, but maybe a mob of Ozies messing about with rainbow inks could pitch alternative futures. The wind was changing. Like beasts in the wild, we had caught the scent of Elysium, and were bounding towards its source, our minds bent on a future of fun, fantasy and adventure. A new generation, remember, with a new explanation.

  In April ’68, Louise and I paid fifty pounds e
ach for a ten-day charter flight to New York. John Wilcock put us up at his Greenwich Village apartment, adjacent to the abode of his former neighbour, Lenny Bruce. ‘He came here all the time,’ John monotoned. ‘That man was such a downer.’

  The Village! I was dazzled by the shiny diners exuding the aroma of coffee and crispy bacon, and the frequency of the fibre-glass buses, with change-chewing ticket robots. But most of all, it was the gung-ho street life that really got me going – the razzamatazz of busking, pan-handling and pamphleteering, set against a consumer cornucopia – books, records, flashy gadgets, fast food and amazingly fancy footwear.

  At the Free School on East 14th Street, I went to an open meeting of the Youth International Party (Yip), where plans were being finalised for a love-in at Central Park the following day. Amplified music was officially banned. ‘Fuck ’em,’ shouted a yippie. ‘We got music. Loud music.’ All of us were asked to bring an item of food, to ‘build a mountain for Dr King’s poor people’. In view of the outrage over the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, City Hall was advised to play it cool over their music ban.

  ‘I’ve tested the flowers for the plane-drop by throwing them off the Empire State,’ announced a vibrant redhead. It was my first sight of Jerry Rubin, founder of Yip, who radiated a brash and powerful energy.

  A printed form was circulated, tick-the-square: ‘I CAN STEAL FOR YIPPIE: Mimeo paper . . . money . . . records . . . dope . . . flowers . . . space . . .’

  At the park the next day, all was serene. Men in purple sweat shirts plastered with badges weaved through the crowd with collection boxes, chanting, ‘Get hip . . . give to yip.’ It was a pre-Woodstock overture of rock bands, babies at breasts, defiant spliffs, balloons and poster give-aways. City Hall was lying low about the amplification. I met a presidential candidate, Louis Abolafia, an ‘artist, poet, philosopher’, whose leaflets pictured him naked, with the slogan ‘What Have I got to Hide?’ Abolafia was a director of the Foundation for Runaway Children and his platform promised to ‘develop your child’s art to the fullest, so that his eyes might see what yours were not allowed to . . .’ A light plane flew overhead, but the wind blew the flower drop across to Madison Avenue.

  At nights, we hit Max’s with Oz contributor, Lillian Roxon. A one-time Royal George regular, she was now on staff at the Sydney Morning Herald. For years she had been toiling away at a doorstop manuscript, The Encyclopaedia of Rock. Buxom, witty and effervescent, Lillian recounted with glee her first story on Bob Dylan, filed in the wake of his chart-busting debut. The Sydney Chief of Staff shot back a telex: ‘Forget this fly-by-night folk-singer – rush 2000 wds on the Singing Crosby Brothers.’

  A monosyllabic Andy Warhol sat at the adjacent table, buoyed by Viva and assorted studs and stars. I plied him with samples of Sharp’s posters. ‘Wow,’ he said. Lillian quipped, ‘Andy lets everyone exploit him to his own advantage.’ Catching sight of Sharp’s glowing Van Gogh portrait, Jimi Hendrix drifted over, ‘Hey man, what group does he front?’ ‘Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps,’ I replied, ever the smart-arse. Warhol took us back to the Factory and we watched the latest Morrissey/Warhol flick, Lonesome Cowboys. The Superstars hung out in awesome hauteur. ‘Wanna do a movie?’ Paul Morrissey asked Louise. ‘No.’ When it came to monosyllables, Louise could outdo Andy any day.

  Flipping through the Village Voice one afternoon, I noticed a small advertisement for a preview at the Biltmore Theatre. Its title was intriguing: Hair. Posing as a stringer for the Evening Standard, I conned free tickets. The programme notes were a tickler: ‘Miss Sally Seaton lives in the East Village. She’s for acid, sex and peace.’ That night, as the most Yeti-like among the dressed-to-the-nines theatregoers, I saw my fantasies take wing – sex, satire, soul, pot, rock and revolution, with a draft-dodger hero, and the leading lady consorting with two drop-outs. Roll over Rodgers and Hammerstein. Surely the cultural revolution is unstoppable now, I yammered to Louise in the lobby, both of us high on Hair. It was as if my letter in the New Statesman had slapped on glitter dust and dancing shoes.

  People in the Village boasted they never went north of Fourteenth Street. Naturally I zipped up to Macy’s, lured by nostalgia for my days at Farmers, and counted twenty-one brands of toaster.

  Louise and I went to Union Square for the Saturday meeting of Yip. The rage at the shooting of Martin Luther King was unabated. A leaflet proclaimed, ‘We’ll write vengeance on the walls of the White House.’ One passer-by, an elderly woman, tore it to shreds. For a moment, a couple of black yippies looked as though they would do the same to her.

  Jerry Rubin mounted a soap-box, urging a disruption of the forthcoming Democratic Convention in Chicago. ‘It’s our festival of youth. The yippies are the children of the middle class, and we refuse to grow up. We say . . . fuck you white America . . .’ The crowd cheered, as the Saturday shoppers scurried by. No one in Britain dared to taunt the establishment like this. Our radicals wrote essays, wore kaftans, argued about Trotsky. Sure, Michael X jumped up and down for the media, but his followers could be counted on one hand. The yippies seemed to speak for the entire counter culture, for the spirit of the changing times. A man held up a home-made amplifier: ‘I built this. We can control crowds with it. We can disrupt police. Help me . . . we’ll make dozens . . . and take them to Chicago!’ Cheers. Rubin grabbed it, his oratory soared.

  ‘The New Left created the teach-in . . . the hippies created the bein . . . so come with us to Chicago and the yippies will create the “Do-In”. A love-in plus agit prop.’ Cheers, applause. The ‘Do-In’ field kitchens, buses and medical teams were already in place.

  Another yippie roared from the soapbox, ‘For funds we’ll loot Macy’s. Twenty of us can hand the cashier a flower and head for the door . . .’ He sought volunteers for a unit of anti-police saboteurs. Other plans were unleashed:

  – The Underground press will come from all over the country and publish a daily paper, teaching people to start their own.

  – Daily workshops on draft dodging.

  – Yippies dressed like Vietcong, shaking hands with politicians.

  – Cars painted like cabs to collect delegates from Washington Airport and drop them off in Wisconsin.

  ‘Thousands of us will burn draft cards at the same time,’ shouted Rubin, hoarse, short and unstoppable, ‘and the paranoia and guilt of the government will force them to bring thousands of troops . . . Our long hair alone will freak them out . . . and remember – the more troops, the better the theatre . . .’

  ‘Right on, Jerry.’

  Watching this from the edge of the grass, I felt tame and middle-class, yet eager for the fray. Hair was more than a musical, I realised, it was the symbol of a new world order – or disorder.

  In May, Paris exploded. It was sparked by the panic of a university Chancellor, who, to quell an insubstantial sit-in, summoned police to the Sorbonne. Enraged by the convoy of black vans, students attacked with bricks and iron railings. Retaliation, arrests, a riot, cracked skulls . . . Days later, 50,000 students marched through the Champs Elysées with red banners, singing the ‘Internationale’. And so it went, dragging in the rest of the country. Thousands of schoolkids surged through Paris, chanting, ‘Power is in the street, not in Parliament’. Workers held a general strike, paralysing the city, and the government of Charles de Gaulle was brought briefly to its knees.

  In the London basement, we formed a committee to ‘Free France’, a hasty coalition of Notting Hill hippies and BBC Marxists, that surely had de Gaulle shaking in his bottes. The shy producer of The Eleventh Hour, Tony Smith, was hoisted on to the dining table, from where he exhorted us to seize the moment and align with the spirit of the Sorbonne. While The Eleventh Hour had run its course, it was nearing midnight for the bourgeoisie. ‘Those who make a revolution by halves,’ quoted this rolled-umbrella radical, a future Oxford don, ‘will dig their own graves.’

  Free France printed 5,000 pamphlets proclaiming ‘solidarity’ with the revolution and smuggl
ed them across the channel with an Australian backpacker. To the lefties, miscreants and hangers-on assembled in the basement, I announced that our correspondents were roaming the Left Bank, pens poised. Angelo Quattrocchi was actually at our design studio in Fulham, ears glued to the BBC World Service. On the first day of the riots, as he filed his copy for an Italian newspaper, he held the phone to the radio speaker, and captured the atmosphere: ‘At this moment I am standing at a window on the Left Bank,’ he shouted, ‘the revolutionaries claw at the cobblestones, their eyes bright, their hands bloody . . .’ At the time, he was observing the 31 bus. While Fleet Street would dismiss the rebellion as ‘an extravagant camouflage of poetry, sex and nonsense’, Angelo’s verdict was far more compelling: ‘This revolution is the ecstasy of history.’

  My sister phoned from Paris. She held the receiver out the window – explosions, chanting, screams – and said the flics were beating up anyone they could find, including a woman under her window. Jill had amassed a pile of student broadsheets, which she would rush to Oz.

  The basement door swung open to reveal an Aussie mate with a head bandage, wounded on the barricades. He plugged a cassette into our twenty-five-pound Japanese ‘solid state’ sound system, and the voice of the rebel who stormed the Odéon Theatre, Jean-Jacques Lebel, crackled to life. We are for the total destruction of categories. His accent was intoxicating. The din in the background sounded like the Bastille collapsing.

  We want everyone to use the university for whatever they want. Not only for education, but to eat, sleep, fuck and get high . . . We want to demolish the structure of the consumer society – and that includes culture. What a cop-out. It’s the culture of money. It starts as art, like the cinema, and ends up as an industry, like Hollywood. A spectacle for people who do not participate in any way with what’s happening. Consumed like a car or a fridge, whether it’s Moliére or Brecht. The basement erupted in cheers. His voice rang on: Our action is even to demolish the Left. The unions manipulate workers into obeying the government. Only self-management can set them free. In this revolution we are trying to re-invent the concept of life, of language and of political expression.