‘On the downhill stretch?’
‘Richard worked hard,’ Louise said. ‘As hard as anyone can in a madhouse.’ Ed Victor had been nagging on the phone from the day we returned. Adding to my worries, the co-founder of Yippie, Abbie Hoffman, had just published Revolution for the Hell of It, a call to arms written in a convulsive three-day amphetamine spurt. Sizzling with wisecracks and derring-do, it made my own manuscript seem about as much fun as an academic tract on semiotics.
‘The book’s killing you,’ Andrew persisted. ‘You need help.’
Yes, I was grinding away and not getting very far. The recent sale of the US rights added to the pressure and guilt. If another Oz is late, Felix warned, the advertisers will jack up.
Help appeared in the guise of yet another dropped-out former lawyer from Sydney, Jim Anderson, whom Louise had met through a network of expatriate gays. She invited him over.
Jim wore grey-tinted, gold-rimmed, octagonal glasses, and expressed a keenness to assist on the book, and if Oz went with the territory, to work on that too. His portable Olivetti matched mine.
‘I’ve spent the last three years writing an unpublishable novel,’ said Jim, dragging his long blonde hair out of his eyes. ‘My first, and probably my last.’
I told him that about three-quarters of the stuff was written but it needed correcting, re-typing, more research. The Book, like the counter-culture, was bursting apart at the seams.
Jim started checking the number of Sikh temples in India available as crashpads, and as the Oz deadline approached, he was lured into proof-reading and whipping up headlines. His shy, backroom manner went with a mordant and subversive sense of humour. Jim, The Book and Oz were soon inseparable.
To further ease my burden, Andrew agreed to take the reins of the next issue. Like Felix, he wanted to pump up the music coverage to attract advertisers. And he wanted to model the issue on a magazine from the West Coast which had started to appear at alternative media outlets – Rolling Stone. Its layout, unlike Oz’s, was clean and crisp, its format distinctive.
‘We could all help clear the decks for The Book,’ said Felix, ‘by moving Oz into a proper office. I can’t run an ad department outta this briefcase.’
Release had vacated its premises in Princedale Road, about ten minutes’ walk away, and offered us the lease. Andrew scribbled some calculations, based on a rising circulation and future ad sales. Louise said it would be a relief to have the files moved out of our bedroom.
A secretary was already on stand-by. When Felix mentioned her name, Bridget Murphy, I smirked. She was a stunning young woman who sold posters at a stall in Kensington Market.
‘Bridget is a fully qualified shorthand typist,’ he said.
There was a knock on the door. Michael X looked leaner and meaner since his jail spell. And now he was in trouble again. ‘Did you really attack those cops with a knife?’ I scolded, over a quick pot of tea, alluding to tabloid accusations.
A skeletal hand stroked a wispy beard. ‘If four men come to your house at midnight and bash down the door, what do you do? Treat them as guests?’ The police were looking for guns. ‘First they harass me in jail – now they’re harassing me at home.’
Could he write about it?
‘Sure.’ He was no longer tied to the liberal weekly, New Society. ‘They’re so gutless. When I was shopped, they ran for cover.’ Malik said their editor had once been a personal friend, but had refused to condemn his sentence in print, despite assuring him how awful it was, and how unjust. ‘That’s the meaning of the English to me – they talk all the time about being sorry, but they don’t really feel a thing.’
Andrew’s folder of potential copy included an ‘emergency’ letter from Jerry Rubin: ‘1965 already seems like a childhood memory,’ he wrote. ‘Then we were going to conquer the world.’ The aims were still the same – ending the war, wiping out racism, mobilising the poor, taking over the universities – but the ‘old audaciousness’ was gone. Cynicism and shallowness prevailed. The movement had been too successful: ‘We’re the most exciting energy force in the nation, stealing the kids out of schools.’ And because of this, the various arrests, trials and court appearances have ‘bottled up our resources, sapped our energy and demoralised the spirit. Meanwhile, the cops are smiling.’
Black activists had been targeted – Huey Newton in prison, Eldridge Cleaver in exile, the Oakland Seven accused of conspiracy. Even Dr Spock, whose permissive views on child-rearing adorned many a family bookshelf, faced two years in the pen for urging teenagers to evade the draft. For possessing a joint, Tim Leary had been sentenced to thirty years in jail. ‘How many of our brothers are in court and jail for getting high? Smoking pot is a political act and every smoker an outlaw.’
It seemed so. In Parliament, Baroness Wootton tabled her report on the social impact of cannabis, in which she recommended that penalties be reduced. The media, of all political hues, was outraged. The Home Secretary took the advice of the News of the World and chucked the report in the waste-bin. Time to crush butterflies again.
Since the Chicago riots, Jerry Rubin’s own life had been grim: arrests, surveillance, wire-tapping, drug busts, undercover agents, travel restrictions. He was dragged off the main street of Chicago in the middle of the night by four undercover cops, luckily witnessed by an influential columnist who happened to be passing. ‘This is not the beginning of the police state,’ he noted in the arch-conservative Chicago American. ‘This is the police state.’ Rubin predicted that 1969 would be the year of the courts. ‘We must attack the myths surrounding the courts as ferociously as we have attacked the American myths of war, apple pie, your friendly neighbourhood cop and “free elections”. Maybe Pigasus should become a judge.’
We decided to run his letter in the next issue, as a companion piece to the ‘Jail Notes’ by Michael X.
Felix showed us a new LP. ‘This is the only band which kept on playing during the Chicago riots,’ he said, sticking on the MC5. ‘KABBOOOOOMMMM . . .!’
It was like being hit on the head by a thousand guitars. ‘Kick out the jams, Motherfuckers. KARAAAAASHHHH!’
A beefy man in a bluish suit and striped tie knocked on the door. ‘Jesus, the fuzz . . .’ Felix grabbed his briefcase and fled to the bathroom.
‘That doesn’t sound like Handel,’ remarked a familiar voice, handing me a wad of copy. It was Clive James. ‘I know you lot think I’m a four-cornered, hard-edged perimeter of absolute squareness . . .’
‘Oh, Clive . . .’
‘Which I am. I happen to believe in civilisation.’
‘You are civilisation, Clive,’ I said.
Felix breezed back. He nodded curtly to Clive, sat down on the bed with Louise and began reading to her his record review of Traffic’s Last Exit.
‘I’m opposed to your death-wish,’ said Clive. ‘As long as you guys keep preaching revolution, you’re setting yourselves up to be knocked off. Don’t you know anything about history? Politics isn’t a nursery – you’d be the first to go.’
‘It’s not about storming Buckingham Palace,’ I said (there was a snort from Felix), ‘it’s a matter of trying to change the values and direction of society.’
‘Try being specific.’
‘Winding down our levels of consumption . . .’
‘If you slow down the industrial machine, you’ll cause suffering on a large scale. Can’t you see that?’
‘A lot of people are suffering just trying to maintain the output.’
‘If you try to grab the porridge off their kiddies’ plates, they’ll flatten you.’
‘It’s not a matter of grabbing, or fighting,’ I said, ‘but of trying to alter our heads to change the future.’
‘With mind-deadening drugs?’
‘An alternative culture . . .’
‘Richard, it’s impossible. An alternative society – maybe. But there’s only one culture. It’s all we have. It’s just a matter of adding layers.’
‘Prioriti
es can change, Clive. It’s a special time, don’t you think? A time for new dreams.’
‘Oh sure. All you need is lurve, lurve, lurve – the jingle of your generation, Hollywood’s final triumph.’
Clive chugged away up the stairs in that shiny blue suit.
‘The next issue is falling into our hands,’ I said to Andrew, who’d been flat out on the phone. ‘Clive’s piece will spark debate.’
Another knock at the door – this time from a real policeman. Felix scarpered. Andrew sat white-faced. Louise put on the kettle.
The junior constable introduced himself. Very apologetic. He was trying to serve a traffic summons to the driver of a red Mini Minor, the one my sister had lent to friends after she moved to Paris. He took the details – ‘Your sister’s off the hook then’ – and accepted a cup of tea. We had an amiable chat about the impact of mini-skirts, which he thought were a threat to public decency. ‘On a bus, when the girls walk down the stairs – you can see everything. It’s arousing.’
I agreed.
‘Trouble is, some chaps follow them home. Jump ’em . . .’ He was a well-meaning officer, disoriented by the new freedoms. We shook hands as he departed, and I thought about the chasm between the cops in London and those that battered long-hairs in Chicago and Paris.
It was a busy day in the basement. In the late afternoon, two men in overalls strode through the door and asked for Louise. She pointed to the bound bundles stacked against the walls, all along the hall and even in a damp recess behind the bathroom mirror. ‘Take them away,’ she said, thrilled that the waste-managers had finally arrived. No longer would we be tripping over the back issues of Oz.
‘You’ll regret this, Louise,’ said Felix. ‘One day we might be able to flog them for a fortune.’
Dramatic news from Marrakesh. Just after we left, there was a frenzy of police raids, drug busts, deportations. Sandy, the bagpiping Scot, was dragged off to jail. Neal Phillips, who inherited our house, was assaulted by the landlord. ‘He broke through the door with a blowtorch,’ Neal wrote, ‘then melted down everything in sight.’ This included the books, cassette player, clothes, mattress . . . ‘Too heavy, man. I’m splitting to Ibiza.’
The BBC show How It Is was renewed in a later time-slot, and producer Tony Palmer swore to make it gutsier. I mentioned the mounting risks to young travellers on foreign soil, and suggested that Sandy-the-Scot, who had just been repatriated, tell his story, maybe even sing.
‘They decided right away that I was selling the stuff, not smoking it,’ he told the hostess, Angela Huth, right after her interview with Twiggy. ‘To make me confess, they tied my hands and feet and hoisted me on a scaffold between two desks, letting me hang there.’
Angela beamed her concern. ‘Did you get a chance to see a solicitor?’
A grim laugh. ‘They removed my shoes and socks and lashed me with a cowhide whip. Blood everywhere. My feet swelled up like balloons.’ Then the police bound his face in a towel and poured on water, to simulate symptoms of drowning. ‘They did this every morning and afternoon for three days.’
Palmer signalled Angela, to wind up, but she was mesmerised.
‘I blubbered like a baby,’ Sandy went on, ‘the first time I’ve cried since I was ten . . .’ He was then dumped in a tiny cell with eleven others. ‘The British Consul told me to warn my friends that the hippie dream is over. They’re cleaning up the place for tourists.’ Sandy’s friends in the audience jumped up and recounted similar tortures.
Release launched a new organisation to deal with drug busts overseas and the BBC informed Tony Palmer that such a segment was inappropriate for a magazine show about British youth.
An invitation to an ‘afternoon chat’ came from the editor of Rolling Stone. When I arrived at the Soho office, I was guided to a round white table, along with the editors of Time Out, IT, and a few Underground scribes. French Chardonnay flooded the room and a plump man in jeans with a boyish grin introduced himself as the ‘Hugh Hefner of pop’ – Jann Wenner. He wanted to meet us personally, he said, ‘because I’m about to muscle in on your territory – like the mafia’. Jann had a partner in his venture – someone he had met about a year before in LA. ‘We decided to make music together in London.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mick Jagger, sauntering through the door in a crushed velvet turquoise jacket, ‘and if there’s gonna be a fuck’n mag in London called Rolling Stone, I want a piece of it.’ Everyone laughed. Hands were shaken.
‘Who has editorial control?’ I asked.
A sly exchange of glances, as though this had been mulled over many times. Jann said, ‘Of course the boys will have a bit of a say in content . . .’
‘Fifty per cent,’ said Mick, grinning.
‘What about reviewing a Stones album, or a concert – any conflict of interest?’
‘Of course not,’ Jann said, ‘it won’t be a fanzine.’ Today’s meeting was to let us know about the deal before it hit the press. ‘You’re not our rivals. We’re here to knock off the music mags.’ He hated them all. ‘Dumb. Out of touch.’ Jann had started Rolling Stone in San Francisco, after Melody Maker had rejected a piece he had sent them about the rise of acid rock.
‘They regret it now,’ Mick said.
‘Still take acid?’ I asked the editor. It didn’t look like it.
‘It was a fantastic turn around in my life,’ Wenner said, tilting back his chair. ‘When the scene first started, you could take LSD without having to read about some freak trip in Life magazine, some horror story.’
As we whiled away the hours over the wine, with Jann holding court and Mick darting in and out as it suited him, I could see that Jann’s insight into the movement was unclouded by sentiment or rhetoric. ‘What kind of revolution is it when you burn down a college hall, take over a library, rant and rave, carry a Vietcong flag, get thrown into jail and then – ten minutes later – get bailed out?’
I tried to argue that the radical agenda was wider than a library sitin.
‘Yippies and creeps in search of glory.’ Jann’s faith in the future lay in rock ’n’ roll. ‘That’s where the real power is – the Rock ’n’ Roll Army – the foot soldiers who go home to their mums and dads at the end of the day and turn them on.’ Best of all, turn them on to Rolling Stone.
His main interest was in broadening his magazine’s ad base – but within limits. ‘Why does Oz accept those sex ads?’
‘Why not? A six-month contract!’
‘It affects the grace of the pages. The vulgarity puts people off.’
He was probably right, I barely noticed them. Wenner said the best hope for the future was for oldies to kick the bucket. ‘Every time I pick up the papers and read of a famous one dying, I think, the more, the faster, the better. It’s the only way.’
When we got up to leave, he thanked us for coming and for ‘drinking my wine’.
Mick yelled from the doorway, ‘No, Jann. Drinking my wine.’
In February 1969 Sydney Oz closed down, Richie Walsh citing a ‘lack of support from the public and advertisers’. Sharp, who slipped back for Christmas, was fittingly able to draw the farewell cover: exploding eyes and UFOs, a hand fluttering good-bye from a spermy ocean, not waving but drowning. For London Oz, Sharp sent a map of Australia drawn as a frowning face. From its shores, a mob of kangaroos took wing for Europe, metamorphosing in flight into stoned-out griffins. The caption was a quote from Banjo Patterson: ‘There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around . . .’
In March, Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman. Fellow Beatle George Harrison made it to the church on time, but was called away from the reception. Detective Sergeant ‘Groupie’ Pilcher had struck again. George acknowledged the seeds on the coffee table in his country home, but the block of hash, er ‘found’ in the shoe cupboard by the police dog, was ‘a mystery’. After his conviction, the Beatle told the Sunday Times, ‘I’m a tidy sort of bloke – I put records in the record rack, tea in the tea caddy and pot in the
pot box. That was the biggest block of hash I’d ever seen.’
While rumours of Pilcher plantings were rife, it was only Release and the Underground press which gave them credible airing. On rock superstars it was open season. In May, at their Chelsea home, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull had just finished dinner when Pilcher and his squad burst through their door and sniffed around for cannabis. John Lennon had been Pilcher-busted a few months before – hence ‘semolina pilcher’ in ‘I am the Walrus’ – and found this an opportune moment to fly off to Gibraltar with his new love, Yoko Ono, for a ‘quiet wedding’. It was front-paged worldwide. The couple spent a week in bed in the honeymoon suite of the Amsterdam Hilton, a ‘lie-in for peace’. This bedroom burlesque progressed, suite by suite, to a hotel in Montreal, where they recorded ‘Give Peace a Chance’ with back-up singer Timothy Leary.
A tubby Aussie journalist with the Sunday Times, and an avowed Marxist, Alex Mitchell, wanted my advice. Alex had once worked on the Sydney afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror, in the days when Rupert Murdoch was burping his first bubbles as a media magnate. ‘We were so pissed off by your attacks on us in Oz,’ he recalled, ‘that when we noticed you walking near our pub one night, we wanted to biff you.’
‘What stopped you?’
‘A couple of sheilas on the staff. Anyway, you were right to put in the boot.’
Alex, now moonlighting as a researcher for a proposed documentary, said that some high-powered left-wing film-makers had acquired the rights to a popular Penguin paperback, The Body. This work looked at its subject matter in terms of its genetic inheritance, its social conditioning and the natural environment. Already signed were a retired Welsh coal miner, a student radical, an elderly housewife. The film would be a frank look at ageing, disease, childhood, industrial accidents, diet, birth, death . . . ‘Warts and all,’ he said, ‘even somebody taking a shit.’ But they needed a young couple – contemporary, radical, working-class – a couple prepared to make love on screen. ‘It’s not dirty. It’s not porn.’ All part of the rich human tapestry. Did I know anyone? The answer was obvious. Felix Dennis, Oz’s bumptious booster from Wandsworth Bridge Road.
Hippie Hippie Shake Page 17