I was round-shouldered at my desk, threading the pot trail into the fabric of global protest. From a clippings file, courtesy of the BBC, and letters to Oz from far-flung outposts, I found that attitudes among governments were hardening. In Singapore, hippies were forcibly shorn; in Turkey they were dumped across the border (faring better than local dissidents, who could be jailed and tortured). Even in Kathmandu, the long-hairs had outworn their welcome. An American in dreadlocks had been frogmarched through the cobbled streets in chains and put on a plane. His name was Lee Heater. His crime? Tossing American dollars into the air as he strolled along Freak Street. One night, as I marshalled these press anecdotes into evidence of anti-youth paranoia, I took a break to say goodnight to the girls in my bed. Louise was reading The Magus by John Fowles, Jenny’s headphones were plugged into The Doors. Come on, baby, light my fire . . . I changed my mind about working late.
When I lent over to give Jenny a goodnight peck, it was like extracting a pin from a grenade – kaboom! Spontaneous joy! No premeditation, no set fantasy, just an entwining of fleshly desires and long-held affections. The three of us tossed about on the sheets until dawn. For me, it was a sensation of wholeness, as if my dislocated yearnings – for a wife, for a mistress – united for once in sweaty tumult, without tears or deceit.
For the following weeks, the three of us were inseparable. We went to my sister’s farmhouse in Beccles, where Louise and Jenny took amphetamines and made a cake. While they nattered and dithered over the ingredients and obsessively mixed and remixed the batter, I tried to concentrate on The Book. When the cake finally went into the oven, the birds in the oak trees were starting to chirp.
In early December 1968, I strolled to the Queensgate Hotel for the belated launch of the Rolling Stones LP Beggar’s Banquet (its sleeve finally plain and tasteful). This was a dressy affair, invitation only, with white namecards on linen tablecloths. The lads were in high spirits at the end of the room, as liveried staff unloaded silver platters of steaming roasts. A roadie threw a chicken leg at Mick, grazing his ear, and he hurled back a carcass. The buffoonery was on! Salad slopped on the carpet, gravy splattered the walls, mashed potato dripped from chandeliers, guests ducked. Brian Jones slammed a custard pie into Mick Jagger’s face. Food fights can be funny in movies but I hated to be in the middle of one. If this is anarchy-in-action, I thought sourly, bring back Louis XIV. As I slipped away, the street-fighting man was busy sousing the waiters with sorbet.
The phonecalls from Ed Victor persisted. ‘Are we there yet, Rich?’ We weren’t. Not by a long shot, but I put on a brave voice. The research had avalanched. About a hundred editors of Underground newspapers filled out my questionnaire, the pithiest coming from Canada’s Loving Couch Press: ‘My personal aim is to fuck up my readers for twenty-five cents.’ Each month, Oz needed intensive nursing on to the streets. Copy to sub, creditors to appease, pages to lay out. Other books appeared, such as The Limits of Protest, by Oz contributor Peter Buckman, who delved into the roots of resistance, threatening my aim to be first with a radical overview.
Towards the end of December ’68, with Oz 17 almost ready for the printers, Louise had had enough of my writing block.
‘Darling, we’ve got to get you away somewhere.’ I agreed. Fleeing the city with my research and my writing machine was an excellent idea. Andrew Fisher would ‘put the issue to bed’, and Felix Dennis would help him.
As a street-seller, Felix had been a sensation. Ozes flew out one door, cash rolled in another. His enthusiasm for the mag was unbounded. He tried his hand at record reviews, sweating over each paragraph for hours, and later started a column called ‘Poverty Cooking’. At his suggestion, the music coverage was enlarged and separated into a supplement, Mozic. During deadlines, Felix was a permanent fixture at the Fulham studio, as Jon Goodchild prepared the text and the artwork for the camera: a complex sandwich of overlays, and hand-inked colour separations. It was rarely we could afford the four-colour process taken for granted by the glossy magazines, and our special effects came from an inspired juggling of what was known as spot colouring. Jon’s ingenuity was largely responsible for the evolution of Oz’s unique look.
Felix had ‘contacts’ in the record biz, he said, who had lucrative budgets, so I appointed him ad manager.
Jenny Kee landed a job at the Chelsea Antique Market – not a depot for Regency chiffoniers, but High Style HQ for the hippie haute monde. Cast-off Dior, Lanvin, Vionnet. Costly discards from stately home wardrobes recycled into cut-price costuming for the crashpad generation. ‘Sorry, darls,’ Jenny was in fashion fantasyland and unable to join Louise and me on The Book Finishing Trip. Seeking a cover for Oz, we went to Bob Whitaker’s studio, still littered with Martin Sharp’s artwork. On a huge sheet of perspex was one of his pop images – a question mark. Apt, I thought. The two women posed naked in front of it and Bob started shooting. Click! Click! Click! After forwarding the transparencies to Good-child, Louise and I kissed Jenny goodbye and took a taxi to Heathrow.
We stopped off in Paris for a Christmas feast with Jill and Angelo Quattrocchi. The rented apartment in Rue de l’Abbé de l’Epeé overlooked the Luxembourg Gardens, and Jill pointed to a glade immortalised by Cézanne. ‘Emile Zola once came to this building,’ she said, leading us to a sunny room with a grand piano, where the décor alternated between gothic Gustav Doré lithographs and glowering Solidarity posters. On mattresses in a corner slept crumpled forms in Mao jackets – radicals on the run, apparently.
‘Here the rebellious kids are forced from the schools and beaten,’ Angelo explained, carving the turkey, ‘while Oz still raves on about Vietnam and Che Guevara . . .’
‘Oz covered the May events pretty well – you wrote the stuff.’ Even if he had been stuck in London for the opening salvos.
‘Man – it’s still going on. Five thousand new pigs. Tens of thousands of new workers who despise their trade unions.’ Short and manic in a high-buttoned jacket, Angelo wielded the carving knife like a sabre. In profile, he looked like Napoleon, but spoke like a nineteenth nervous breakdown. ‘The king is naked, shivering, ashamed. Breakfast, tube, job, telly, sleep, breakfast . . .’
‘Yes, darling, it’s Christmas.’ Jill upturned the champagne. ‘To our families.’ She looked radiant. A new love, a new novel in the typewriter, an Italian Quixote propping up the barricades by day and reciting the hot bits from Pietro Aretino to her at night; plus a lucrative job extolling Evinrude engines. ‘Let’s phone home,’ she said.
‘In the caverns of the housewives’ minds,’ Angelo was assuring Louise, ‘the rats are squealing . . .’
In the alcove, Jill whispered, ‘Your Louise shimmers with a fearful beauty. She’s like Ophelia.’
We made brief echoey contact with Upalong, exchanging seasonal well wishes. The oldies were in the middle of a heat wave. Back at the table, Angelo was still at it. ‘The more I want the revolution, the more I want to make love.’ Louise stood glazed and polite as he continued. ‘The more I want to make love, the more I want the revolution.’
‘Sounds like Chinese water torture,’ I whispered to Jill, ‘but if anyone can turn you into an anarchist – he can.’
She laughed. ‘The French authorities are such shits,’ she said, ‘they do it all by themselves.’
‘Unctuous managers of ignorance called professors,’ Quattrocchi was saying, as we climbed in the cab. ‘On telly, sinister clowns recite rosaries of irrelevant non-facts . . .’
‘Yes, Angelo, send it to Oz.’ The crew of Apollo 8 took off to orbit the moon, preparing the way for a future landing, and Louise and I took off for Morocco.
The first person we met in Marrakesh was Lee Heater, the American who had been deported from Kathmandu for scattering money in Freak Street. His address was listed in IT as a crashpad. Through a hubbub of twisted streets and screeching, stone-throwing urchins, Louise and I found our way there. In the candle-flickering gloom, Lee was shaving a woman’s head. Lice eradication. His own dreadlock
ed hair coiled from his skull like the snakes of Medusa. The woman’s eyes were blank. Since the previous week’s love-in she had lost the use of her voice. ‘Too much acid,’ said Lee.
I asked how it felt to be frogmarched down Freak Street. ‘The fuzz, they disappeared me through the smoke rings of my mind,’ came the husky Texan drawl, ‘down the foggy ruins of time – far out.’ Bodies stirred, hash fumes filled the air. Lee’s chalice was his chillum, the perpetual circulation of which was accompanied by a chorus of coughs. ‘Oz – far out.’ Lee was attended by a Moroccan boy, Mohammed – ‘its okay, he’s taken acid’ – who was dispatched to find us a place to stay.
Louise and I moved on to a tiled floor in the bowels of the old city, where two lemon trees struggled in the rocky courtyard. The rent was trifling. With Mohammed’s help at the markets, we picked up a mattress, a stove, a radiator and blankets. I laid out the reference books and Underground newspapers. Louise toured the bazaars, the cafés, the hippie hotels. At nights, we strolled among the open fires of the medina, where inexplicable dishes bubbled in recycled kerosene tins, smelling of garlic and spices, and served up for the smallest coin of the realm. Then it was grainy black coffee at the Café Sportif, where the Western hordes stone-rapped, relishing the antics below in the famous square, the Djmaa el Fna. At any moment, the clippety-clop of a hunchback galloping by, whipping his buttocks, imagining he was a horse, foaming at the mouth. Or a street band in rags wailing brassy horns at the moon, setting over the minarets. Snake charmers, pin-heads, acrobats . . . This privileged view from the Sportif, unconsciously colonial, rested on the disparities between First World and Third.
Each morning I would rug up at the Olivetti, grinding out histories of Underground newspapers. It was less arduous than trying to devise an original explanation for the global uprising of middle-class youth. Danny the Red, the hero of the Paris barricades, had already produced Obsolete Communism for André Deutsch, which I planned to digest during the moments that Marrakesh didn’t collapse on my head . . .
At midnight there was a violent clanging. When I shuffled into the hall, the Moroccan woman from upstairs made the sign of a throat being cut – mine. She repeated the words, ‘Crazeee . . . crazeee.’ For the next few hours the clanging continued, as Louise and I huddled close on our mattress, wondering who it was . . . and whether we’d still be alive in the morning. So that’s why the rent was so cheap.
The hit song ‘Marrakesh Express’ hadn’t been recorded yet, but the town was packed. An Oz contributor turned up, having finally been released from jail in Greece – Neal Phillips, whose piece we had laid out like a Greek flag in John Wilcock’s Oz/Other Scenes. ‘Within four days of that Oz hitting the streets I was grilled about it by the secret police.’ Neal, a bearded vagabond hipster, had been dragged from his cell at midnight by the KIP, ‘those beaters of feet, shockers of balls, pluckers of pubic hair’. Oz was put on the table like a murder weapon – his only protection the fragile anonymity of his byline: ‘Name withheld’. The fuzz were aware that John Wilcock had once paid him a visit. Their ‘experts’ had compared the style of the Oz piece to Neal’s personal letters – now, make it easy on yourself – sign the confession.
No, no, no.
Neal was grilled about the ‘Pornography of Violence’ Oz, which contained a detailed insight into the junta’s methods of torture. Since its publication, the colonels had been bombarded with letters, petitions, abuse. His interrogators were joined by an official from the American Embassy, ‘ready to plug my answers into a worldwide fuzz network’. At the last minute, under an amnesty decree issued by King Constantine, Neal was released and deported. In Rome he dropped acid with a troupe of nomadic actors, the Living Theatre, who claimed to live the revolution around the clock and around the world. Exhausted, Neal slipped off to Morocco, lured by the legacy of William Burroughs in Tangier, and the promise of cheap oblivion.
Mohammed disclosed the mystery behind the midnight thumps. Our landlord was a lunatic. Quite an achievement in this town, to be certified officially mad. He had a propensity for violence, rape and alcohol. Usually locked in an asylum, he sometimes managed to escape. In the meantime, our Moroccan co-tenants reinforced the bolts.
A letter arrived from Jenny Kee. She had adorned the envelope with a collage of herself and Louise embracing, the outcome of the Oz photo session. Jenny wanted to fly to Marrakesh. ‘I love and miss you both very much!!!’ she wrote.
So many hippies were flooding into town, it was no surprise the locals were freaked. The dapper drifters in embroidered skirts and cowboy boots were so delighted by the bright satin ’50s underwear favoured by the matrons of Marrakesh that they wore them outside their denims, à la Madonna twenty-five years later. A veiled local demanded, ‘Where do you come from? Where are you going? Who are you?’ None of us really knew.
Ignoring our pleas for solitude, Lee Heater often barged into our room. He spouted copious chunks from his two favourite books, his only worldly possessions – The Book of Tao and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. ‘Back in the States I used to be an evil bastard,’ he said, ‘but the day I took acid I joined Sergeant Pepper’s Band.’ Lee was connected to a shadowy network in California, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and his mission in life was to sing the praises of LSD (and probably sell it, though he claimed the source of his erratic income was from an heiress). He was thirty-six, but looked older. His patter was repellent, yet fascinating, often strangely wise. I couldn’t shake him off, no matter how long I hid at my desk, absorbing the intricacies of European neo-Marxism. ‘He’s weird and dangerous,’ Louise warned. ‘Why are you so interested?’ He was the best and the worst of the Underground, a demon from the depths with a saintly streak, an embodiment of the scene at its edge, a scene I was writing half-cocked, and he was living full bore.
Through him we met Sandy, who sported kilt and sporran and played the bagpipes. He would also, if pressed, sing madrigals.
It was said that 60 per cent of Moroccans smoked kif, but none of the 40 per cent ever showed up in Marrakesh. The foreigners tried to outsmoke the locals. On our last night, we sat in the room admiring the patterns projected on the ceiling by the kerosene burner. Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow rotated wearily on the cassette – the batteries came from Shanghai, White Elephant brand, and they weren’t joking. A month in Marrakesh and I still hadn’t finished the chapter on the Underground Press. Suddenly a crash – wine bottles shattering on the front door. A stream of incomprehensible insults. The madman! The bolts! It was too late. A lurching figure in a hooded djellaba pushed into the courtyard, towing a whale of a woman in a white petticoat. Her lips were smeared with scarlet. The landlord threw her under the lemon tree, his head went between her thighs.
‘Man, this is the most incredible hash,’ said Neal Phillips, stretched on our mattress.
The Moroccan lifted his head and shouted, ‘Turn up zee moozic.’ A bottle passed between the pair. They wanted to party, but I had a plane to catch. Sandy-the-Scot burst into a medieval folksong, interspersed with riffs from his bagpipes. The woman staggered towards me and lunged at my genitals. The landlord caught sight of Louise, bellowed, and proposed a wife-swap.
‘Wow, man . . . this hash.’
‘Shut up, Neil – do something.’
He took another puff. Lee Heater stormed into the room, pursued by a group of locals, whom he had somehow managed to offend on the way. As they clung to his dreadlocks and dragged him outside, he shouted, ‘Go lightly from the ledge, Babe, go lightly on the ground . . .’ Louise and I huddled in the corner behind a fortress of baggage, as the bagpipes wailed and the batteries finally ran out. The neighbours arrived with clubs and herded the invaders into the alley.
But not for long. Crashing glass, screams, thumps. Neil Phillips was comatose, dawn was breaking. Louise and I struggled over the garden wall and on to the bus for Casablanca, accepting a farewell hash cookie from the Tambourine Man. It felt like a five-minute bus ride, despite four hours on
the clock. Next we were sitting in a Paris transit lounge on a Monday morning, swathed in embroidery, furs and Goulamine beads, as chic passengers giggled behind diamond-ringed fingers. Like the crew of Apollo 8, we had splashed back to reality.
11
The HIGHEST RITUAL
EXPRESSION of our FAITH
In February ’69, Felix Dennis burst through the basement door in a new fawn suit. ‘Yeah, everyone’s taking the piss,’ he said, flicking open a thick leather case and handing me the Oz cheque book, ‘but if we want the ads . . .’
The new boots added dash. ‘Vinyl?’
‘Nah. Snake-skin.’ With the launch of Mozic, the record ads were rolling in. Felix turned to Louise, who was lying in bed flicking through the latest Oz, delayed again by lily-livered printers. ‘That cover. You’re sensational.’
‘But Jenny and I look so . . . out of it.’
‘Weren’t you?’
She laughed. ‘Oh Felix, I don’t remember . . .’
Jenny Kee had a new boyfriend, deeply stylish and pretty in the way she was – the Sydney painter Michael Ramsden. He was the one who had stormed upstairs in mid-stomp, with Marsha Rowe on his back.
‘Apple’s in again for the next issue,’ Felix said. ‘Electra, Musicland, MGM . . . a few import shops,’ He raved on about a new group, Led Zeppelin – a ‘turning point for rock,’ he insisted, ‘just like Dylan and Sergeant Pepper.’ He hit the phone to line up an interview with Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist, while I signed the pay cheques.
Andrew Fisher dropped by. ‘You look worse than when you left.’
‘Exhaustion!’
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