Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  Censorship was still a national sport in my homeland. The Sydney trials of Oz had freed up local media, but the Customs Department kept the drawbridge up on foreign filth. London Oz rarely reached Dad’s letter box.

  ‘We sent you back a batch,’ I said, ‘with Jenny Kee.’

  ‘Confiscated at the airport.’ Dad asked after Jenny, ‘a most unusual lady’. He had never forgotten the woman who sat in the back of the car, naked under a black rubber raincoat.

  ‘She’s doing fine,’ Louise said. ‘Jenny’s got about three jobs – all of them glamorous.’

  Talking with Dad and Louise, it was, for once, more homey than Ozzy in the basement. I was reminded of the last time we had been together – three years ago in the Mosman lounge-room watching TV, my face bandaged, following surgery to straighten out nasal passages. On came The Mavis Bramston Show, the headline-grabbing satirical revue, inspired partly by Oz. A guitar-strumming actor sang a spoof of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin“, adapting it to the local scene. When the end credit revealed me as author, Dad probably abandoned his dream of me as an accountant.

  Louise and I whisked the Colonel off to the sights, including 10 Downing Street and the Arts Lab in Soho. We bumped into Germaine Greer, dazzling in layers of embroidery from Rajasthan. Her hair was now in afro mode, her fingers heavy with Third World rings. Today, the bee in her bonnet was pot. ‘Legalising the stuff won’t be to our advantage, Richard . . . In fact it will have a deadening effect . . . neutralising our dissent. Have you ever been stoned, Mr Neville?’

  ‘I gave up smoking, my dear, after I got pneumonia.’

  One of Sharp’s posters glittered from a window in Drury Lane, adding to the impression I had been trying to convey to Dad, that London was at our feet. Germaine fired off a round at Release, the drug-bust centre, and the ‘gorgeous futility’ of its pot rallies: ‘All those doe-eyed painted people stirring under the grey sky,’ she prattled. ‘Held together by a sense of their own daring – what bullshit!’

  Louise frowned. ‘Oh, Germaine. You’re privileged. Kids get busted every day.’

  ‘They’re stupid. The first rule of pot is don’t get caught.’

  My father purred, ‘You’d be a good catch, my dear.’

  Her eyes shone. ‘Mr Neville, the goverment won’t legalise the stuff until they work out how to control it. Then they’ll exploit it.’ An Underground paper-seller nodded in sympathy, as though witnessing a drug bust.

  Louise told Germaine that being body-searched on the whim of a cop was no fun.

  ‘It’s foolish to carry,’ Germaine snorted, ‘but if you must – you can always chuck it on the floor.’

  ‘That’s okay in a crowded club,’ I said, ‘but not on the footpath.’

  ‘Let them try and body-search me,’ she declaimed. ‘From henceforth, I will carry a decoy packet of basil . . .’

  ‘Body search?’ Dad was intrigued. He asked Germaine if she lived nearby.

  Near enough – she had just moved into a studio in The Pheasantry, right under Martin Sharp.

  ‘How long are you in town, Mr Neville?’ Her smile was warm, her voice treacly. She took Dad by the arm.

  ‘Not long,’ I said protectively and hailed a cab. The Colonel was due to fly to Paris to visit my sister Jill.

  ‘Write us a piece about pot,’ I urged. As we hugged goodbye, she cheekily goosed my dad.

  In the wake of the Chicago riots, the Rolling Stones released a single in the States, ‘Street Fighting Man’, banned by a number of radio stations and denounced. It was unavailable in Britain, due to the hold-up of the LP, Beggar’s Banquet. The proposed sleeve artwork was a shot of a lavatory wall scrawled with graffiti, which Decca rejected. In the basement, we hunched over the speakers to catch the lyrics: Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet, boy/For summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street . . . boy.

  The complete version was printed in Oz 15, for which Sharp painted a pop art portrait of Jagger in full flight.

  ‘Fleet Street’s chain of fools and their allies at university have told us for years that the class struggle didn’t exist,’ wrote David Widgery. ‘In Germany, rebellious students were patronised and put on the front of the glossies.’ When French students revolted, all the talk was of style. ‘And when it does happen here, and maybe it’s no longer chic but brutal and muddy and the rubbish is burning and Harrods is looted, they will still not see it’s about revolution and socialism – nor that for us all else is folly.’

  But folly itself had to be fought. A bookshop owner in Brighton was prosecuted for selling obscene works, which included Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Story of O and East Village Other. ‘Despite all the high-sounding language used by defence experts,’ the prosecutor said, ‘I rely on your Lordships to know a dirty book when you see one.’ They did. Bill Butler, the owner, was fined. I stood astonished at the back of the court and wrote an account of the case for Oz, the only publication in attendance.

  It was the same when Michael X stood in the dock at a magistrates’ court in Reading, charged with vilifying a policeman. The mass media were absent. The Black Power activist was sent to jail – the first person in Britain to be convicted under the new Race Relations laws, designed to protect immigrants.

  Christopher Logue sent us a poem, merging his wishful thinking with intimations of paranoia: ‘Yesterday afternoon the sex police found me in bed with a girl of sixteen . . .’ Dr Allan Cohen, a former colleague of Timothy Leary’s at Harvard, waxed lyrical about a higher form of high. ‘The people who have turned off drugs and moved on to mysticism,’ he told our readers, ‘are the real revolutionaries.’ He put the opposing case to that of our socialist scribes. ‘The real revolution is that of consciousness, which none can control but yourself. It can transcend frustration.’ Cohen argued that only with advanced love and intuition could we know exactly how to get to where we knew we wanted to be.

  Edward de Bono drew diagrams of ways to switch the systems in the brain. Bruce Beresford penned a savage attack on the British Film Institute, his employer at the time, calling it ‘vindictive, exploitive, self-regarding and irresponsible’. In Sydney Oz, he had previously lamented how the Hollywood star system had overpowered the authenticity of Europe’s New Wave. Germaine Greer fielded her pot piece, focusing on the futility of ‘wooing the law’, which should always be treated as ‘the enemy’.

  The law failed to protect life, she wrote, or to stop war, madness or disaster. It was not even worth respecting as a safeguard of property. Many of us do not believe in the inalienable right of property, to the extent that we possess little or nothing, and do not complain when it is used or carried off by others, and tend ourselves to carry off the goods of others, especially department stores . . . The looting of Harrods, predicted by Widgery, may already have begun with Germaine.

  In the same issue, Caroline Coon answered Germaine, telling of a teenage boy who was harassed by police over a few crumbs of grass and carted off to Borstal. The law may not be worth wooing, she argued, but it was worth turning against itself. Release had taken up the cudgels against the Drugs Squad for cases of blatant planting, and won, with costs awarded against the Crown.

  Everyone said it was time for me to try cannabis. In media interviews I was an embarrassment. Anti-heroin, cautious about LSD, a defiant non-smoker. I went to a party hosted by a friend, Virginia Clive-Smith, who wore a dress with a custom-tailored pocket, designed to accommodate the Sergeant Pepper album. Virginia served a Moroccan confection, majoun, a rich fudge impregnated with marijuana, which Louise begged me to try: ‘You won’t regret it. You live too much in your head.’ Reluctantly, I took a nibble. It wasn’t till I got home that the sweetmeat hit me. Until that night, I had thought ‘stereo’ meant two speakers blasting identical noises. When Louise put on an LP by Traffic, I realised – finally! – that twin speakers created a circular soundspace. How could I have been so aurally challenged? I bought a pair of headphones and from then on music mes
merised me . . . for about the next ten years. Later that night, when we finally collapsed into bed, I discovered that a stoned enhancement of the senses was not confined to the ears.

  Early on a September morning, the intercom buzzed at The Pheasantry. ‘Postman here,’ came a gruff voice. A registered package required the occupant’s signature; buzz, click. A scrum stormed Martin’s staircase, armed with a search warrant. They didn’t have to search for long. As his heavies picked over the roaches, Detective Sergeant Pilcher enquired, ‘Where’s Eric Clapton?’ Sharp didn’t know. ‘Have you tried the Speakeasy?’

  By the time I was summoned to the Chelsea police station, Sharp was on a bunk behind bars.

  ‘Like a B-grade movie,’ he said, recounting the patter. ‘If you help us, Guv, we’ll help you.’

  A lawyer was on his way, courtesy of Release. I fetched Sharp pizza and instant coffee, and he asked me to produce a reference on Oz stationery for the court. It would say he was of good character, high repute and a long-time executive of our publishing company.

  Amazingly, it worked – bail was set at twenty-five pounds.

  Sharp wondered at the coincidence between the raid and his role as witness at a parliamentary committee of enquiry. Headed by Baroness Wootton of Abinger, a feisty Labour Party appointee, it was weighing up the pros and cons of legalising marijuana. The Baroness sought a wide range of opinion on the issue, and Oz had been asked to field a spokesman. Its editor being ‘too straight’, Sharp stepped forward. Afterwards, in a charming hand-written note, the Baroness thanked him for the candour of his evidence and the clarity of its expression.

  Sharp reported the bust to his father, pledging to grace the dock in a suit. He already had a three-piece navy blue pin-stripe hanging in the wardrobe. At most, a fifty-pound fine was expected. The court attitude to hash is becoming more and more reasonable, he wrote wishfully to Dr Henry Sharp, and the magistrates feel the police should be chasing real criminals and cease wasting time harassing me . . . us. There has been much favourable comment on cannabis in the press from very prominent doctors.

  In a way, Sharp was glad about the raid. It had cleared The Pheasantry of hangers-on, leaving him free to paint. Pilcher of the Yard still had Clapton in his sights, so a return sortie was widely feared. I’m feeling more alive now than ever, Sharp informed his father. I surprise myself with the images I create; ideas are pouring out. How could he draw them all? What a thrill it was to work with paint and brush, instead of going through printers and platemakers, who always make mistakes.

  Like his Sydney clashes with the law, the pot case stemmed from a single source. It’s age against youth, conservatism against inevitable change, whether the actual form of suppression is obscenity, vagrancy or the illegal possession of certain substances. This change will come as certainly as I, too, will age and become more rigid in my thoughts. In this world, Bertrand Russells are rare. Sharp worried about the impact on his family, should the Sydney Sunday press get hold of the story. But I feel no guilt, no fear and indeed know more about cannabis than the man who will sit in judgement. It was a stance at variance to that of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who had been busted again – also by Pilcher. The stoned Stone wept, grovelled and fell apart, all for a few grains of resin. He was put under psychiatric care.

  Sharp drafted a statement on the virtues of pot and its role in modern society, which he instructed his reluctant solicitor to read to the court. As a first offender, and a gifted artist, the magistrate let him off with the maximum fine allowable.

  If Sharp was hot on pot, he was cooling on rock. His section of The Pheasantry was on top of a disco, and the throbbing percussion from midnight till dawn pounded his pillow. Lying awake, increasingly disenchanted with Latino garage versions of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, he recalled his boyhood. The long summer holidays at Port Hacking; swimming, fishing on the bay and listening to his mother’s 78 rpm recordings – Al Bowley, Hutch, Bing Crosby, Al Jolson. The only time the rancour between his parents turned to romance.

  Recently, he had been startled to hear Al Bowley singing ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime’ over the speakers at a King’s Road record store. Collections of 78s from the ’30s and ’40s were being re-released on LPs. Sharp snapped them up. ‘There’s a guy coming to London,’ his flatmate remarked, ‘who does all the old songs that you like.’ Eric Clapton had seen Tiny Tim perform in New York. In October, Tiny arrived as Top of the Bill at the Albert Hall.

  Before the show, Louise and I met Sharp for a cannabis cocktail. He crushed the Nepalese temple hash in a tablespoon of water and held it over the gas, until it dissolved into a liquid, which he blended with pitch-black espresso.

  The supporting acts were Peter Sarstedt, The Bonzo Dog Doodah Band and Joe Cocker. All of them were a memorable experience, apparently, though I don’t remember. Tiny Tim pulled a ukulele out of his shopping bag and sang his heart out. The melodies were sweet and corny, the singer an enchanter. A quarter of a century later, Mart was still bewitched.

  The songster and the popster were soulmates. From the shards of popular culture, both created an original personal mosaic. It was beachcombing with purpose, giving new meanings to cultural icons and connecting the past to the present. As we jostled into the street, Sharp had the look of an idiot savant who had just seen the clouds of heaven unfurl. That hash was lethal.

  It was in this ecstatic state that Sharp sought to take charge of the next Oz and make it entirely visual. Fine by me. He worked night after night on the floor of The Pheasantry, along with the Melbourne artist and film-maker Philippe Mora. The issue evolved into a forty-eight-page rush-hour of imagery, a cosmic conglomeration collaged from comics, headlines, art books, ads, Playmate centrefolds, the Muybridge human-animal-in-action photos – each page textured with multi levels of meaning. All the stars in the cultural political firmament – from John Lennon to Sophia Loren, Lee Harvey Oswald to J. Edgar Hoover, Primitive Man to President Nixon, Middle Earth to Outer Space, Hitler to Buddha, Crumb to Christ . . . Jackie O, Malcolm X, Elizabeth II, Pius XII, Magritte, Magog, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Dada, famine victims, fashion victims, war and peace. Tiny Tim’s head sat on Charles Atlas’s body, with Tiny announcing, ‘The Ice Caps are Melting’ – mixmastered into a galaxy of pop. The cover carried a warning: ‘The price of admittance your mind . . . not for everybody.’ It was Magic Theatre Oz.

  Reactions varied. Some readers complained of a rip-off, others were ecstatic. ‘Sharp has assembled one of the richest banks of images that has ever appeared in a magazine,’ wrote Robert Hughes. ‘To my surprise, I find myself prepared to ignore the gaucheries, the illiterate Sharp spelling, the word balloons that sometimes read as if they were written by André Breton’s bastard child out of Grandma Moses. None of this will matter in a few years’ time; what does matter and makes the Magic Theatre Oz the only first-class issue in the last sixteen, is that at last a magazine has broken the mould in a lyrical and decisive way. As a frequent non-reader, I can promise you that the readers Oz loses through such an experiment are no loss.’

  Good on yer Bob. While his praise damned all those other issues over which I had slaved in the two years since landing in London, I knew he was right. Sharp at full throttle soared way over my head and into the stars.

  Oz had outlived the ’67 prediction of Richard Ingrams – ‘it won’t last the year’ – by another year, but only just. Each month we scraped together the printing cost from sales revenue. Fees from the BBC and various free-lance assignments kept creditors at bay. Private Eye remained hostile and I was puzzled and hurt. When I met one of its in-house contributors, Patrick Marnham, he seemed keen to write for us. Hearing this, Ingrams threatened him with the sack. Perhaps I should have felt proud that Oz made the Eye mob feel insecure. Printing problems persisted. Firms took fright after two or three print-runs. Weeks of legwork produced a new printer keen for the job, North Riding Publishing. One of its directors was the Labour MP for Bosworth, Woodrow Wyatt, an eccentric jour
nalist and aspiring aesthete. ‘Mr Wyatt is the latest recruit to the Underground,’ announced Private Eye, ‘whose firm will print the controversial Oz.’ This alerted the mud-slinging Sunday newspaper News of the World.

  ‘How can Woodrow Wyatt fail to be shocked by advertisements which offer do-it-yourself formulas for the drug LSD? Can he approve of the obscene poems or the dirty pictures? Or the advice to pot smokers? Clearly not.’ A week later, Wyatt’s firm cancelled the contract.

  We were desperate. Revenue from the previous issue would be received from our distributors only when the next one was delivered, now camera ready. In his New Statesman musings, Paul Johnson gallantly came to our defence. While he held no particular brief for Oz, he was nauseated by the ‘sanctimonious tone’ of the News of the World, which sold itself on a diet of sex. ‘Oz is understandably bitter that a huge capitalist concern . . . should have the power and sheer meanness to jeopardise the existence of a small independent paper.’ To reassure a future printer, if one could be found, my lawyer mate, Andrew Fisher, devised a plan. We would print Oz ourselves. In other words, Oz Publications Ink would contract to print Oz magazine, then subcontract the job to another printer. It worked.

  Jenny Kee came to the basement in tears. Her boyfriend Colin, an elegant bisexual involved with a lord, had hurled himself under a train. Louise consoled her with warm hugs, soft drugs and strong tea, and invited her to stay until she recovered. When the two had met in London, prior to my arrival, Jenny had been frank. ‘Okay, so I slept with your boyfriend in Sydney, but now that we’re friends, it won’t happen again.’ While I toiled away over The Book in the back room, Louise and Jenny tarted up the bedroom. A painting or two, posters, a carpet retrieved from the garbage bay. At night, the three of us shared the family bed in a spirit of friendship, strictly platonic. No, really.