Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  To help pay the bond, we turned the front page into an ad for Electra Records. Even so, it would be the last Oz printed at Peterborough. In the twenty-one issues since February 1967, we had worked our way through seven printers. Phillip Oakes found it ‘ironical’ that the Underground press, which ‘preaches social revolution but – above all – love, love, love – should arouse such enmity in the square world’. He suggested its root cause was ‘youthful contempt for adult values and adult fear of youthful power’. Oakes noted that nobody got rich from Oz and that its editor’s phone had been cut off for non-payment of the bill. He quoted me: ‘The Private Eye people are licensed jesters who enjoy the Parliamentary game. Oz says that society should change.’

  And changing it was. Some places faster than others. When Oz 21 resumed its run, a broadsheet arrived by air from the US, protesting a ten-day siege on a university by the National Guard. Outcry came from ‘occupied Berkeley’. The lead story depicted a ‘reign of terror’, with police tear-gassing students and breaking into homes and college dorms. An onlooker, James Rector, was shot dead, others were maimed by swinging clubs. This was the battle for People’s Park. On the morning of 15 May, when the university fenced off this patch of urban greenery, students and drop-outs fought to win it back. ‘In the face of an occupying army,’ fumed the broadsheet, ‘thousands are still marching and fighting a week later, day after bloody day . . .’ Outcry’s mood matched my mounting anger at the British police, so I decided to print 30,000 copies and insert it as a poster in the belated, but forthcoming Oz. (The Department of Customs and Excise had shelved demands for poster tax.) The insert was on the streets before the tear gas had evaporated, a feat hailed by the Guardian as ‘Oz Wizardry’.

  The remarks of the Rolling Stone editor after the police raids on printers goaded Germaine into a rare declaration of allegiance:

  ‘The Underground is not some sort of scruffy club that Jane Nicholson has refused to join. It’s where the life is, before the Establishment forms as a crust on top, and changes vitality to money. It’s humus, the matrix that the city fathers pin down with foundations, spread asphalt over and crush under piles of glass and steel and concrete. Where it reappears in the overground it is known as dirt. It is used as a repository for waste, shit, offal, dead bodies. From circumference to circumference, through this old terrestrial ball whereon we all in darkness crawl, it extends, the wormy undermined, intermind Underground.

  ‘The people who belong to it all the time are very few, but almost everybody has spent a season there. The Underground remains uncharted, unreliable, unrewarding and irresponsible. If every head who clamours to be of it today were to deny it tomorrow it would still exist. Miss Nicholson may tell the fuzz anything she pleases – her cunt knows better.’

  While Germaine railed against the editor of Rolling Stone, the News of the World railed against Germaine. Seizing on a ‘way-out magazine called Oz’, it warned that students at the University of Warwick, where she now taught, and fans of the ‘zany’ TV show, Nice Time, were in for a big surprise – ‘displays of her bare bosom’. Chunks of Germaine’s groupie apologia were reproduced, along with the scandalous photos. ‘I don’t want to sound patronising to the kids,’ Germaine told their reporter, ‘but I’m trying to bridge the generation gap.’

  The Living Theatre, a nomadic termitary of the cultural revolution, put on a performance at Chalk Farm’s Roundhouse. The troupe, of nine different nationalities, was legendary: a global commune, druggy, anarchist, orgiastic, with a deportation order at every port. Unknown to Fleet Street, the Living Theatre was repeatedly profiled in the Underground press, making my own lifestyle seem not only suburban and square – horror of horrors – but false. The age of theory was over, they argued. The point was to Do It. The opening night was called Paradise Now, but for many in the audience it was Hell on Earth.

  A steamy, scriptless tableau of writhing bodies, exhorting and stamping. Limbs disentangle themselves and figures leap from stage to chairs and berate the audience. ‘You loathsome lemmings,’ shouts one, his hand roughing up a seven-guinea coiffure. ‘Apathetic pigs,’ screams a naked woman, her spit glistening. The swarthy tribe of many colours roam the aisles and urge us all to fight The System. Women leap into laps, their buttocks criss-crossed with Band-aids and mottled with bruises. Driven from their seats, most of the audience roam the floor in confusion. Many either shake their fists at the cast, or rush for exits. Others join in, kiss their neighbours, even strip.

  The Living Theatre comprised thirty-five women and men, and nine children, who shared the box office. ‘The men sleep with the men, the women sleep with the women, but we regularly change partners,’ one of them told the News of the World. ‘We’re wildly happy, stoned, involved with each other but we never know how we’ll cope with tomorrow.’ British audiences were the world’s toughest. ‘Too square . . . too hard to turn on.’ But oh, how they tried.

  The abuse kept coming. ‘You’re all boring bourgeois fuckwits’ was the gist of it. ‘While you deny your primal selves and your thirst for liberation, you are helping enslave the Whole World . . .’ A man of awesome endowment prowled along our row, screaming abuse. His name, I later learned, was Rufus Collins, a former child star from Harlem. He tweaked a spectator’s nose. ‘Relax,’ said Rufus, tugging at the man’s shirt, his own neck veins throbbing, stomach muscles flexing, sweat dripping from his brow. He nestled his head in the man’s lap. ‘Nooooo . . .’ The theatre-goer escaped. Rufus addressed us: ‘Make each of our actions a ritual meditation, like taking a shit. Just allow it to happen; enjoy the relief that the whole body feels. Don’t shut the door!’ Someone yelled, ‘But the odour?’ Rufus glared: ‘If you didn’t eat such alien food, my dear, you wouldn’t stink so much.’

  Elsewhere, a fiery redhead strutted the aisle. ‘The theatre is a trap which excludes the masses,’ she shrieked, ‘I’m done with it. You’re hopeless – a privileged élite – and all privilege is violence to the underprivileged. Go home! You scare me . . . you really scare me . . .’ She spat at a dark-suited man with a drooping moustache. The man lunged forward and grappled with her. Half a dozen of the cast hove into view, surrounded the assailant and began to spit on each other. ‘Look at it. Spit! Spit! Does it hurt? Is it painful? Do you want to kill her? It’s just water.’ The horrified theatre-goer fell to the floor, his shoulders shaking.

  The cast kept up their taunts, aiming to hack away the thick shell of our conditioning. When a calloused foot was thrust in the face of a matron in the front row, probably the wife of a critic, she lunged at the actor’s balls, missing by inches. The founders of the Living Theatre, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, stood in a trance as their communards pummelled them with convincing brutality. A woman in tears shouted, ‘Stop, please stop!’ and rushed forward to help, but by the time she got there the assailants were doing somersaults. Human pyramids built and buckled like de Sade’s table of flesh, until the show ended in cathartic spins and spasms, in poetry, rock and sweaty communal entwinings. It was appalling, devastating, exciting. All boundaries had been eliminated – between audience and stage, between theatre and therapy. The reviews were filled with rage and dismissal. I would not have recommended a full season ticket to the Living Theatre’s performances either, but felt a nervous affinity with their boundary-breaking excesses and with what they were trying to achieve.

  Tony Palmer of How It Is offered a gingerbread cottage in the country, where we retreated to finish The Book. Jim Anderson joined us, correcting grammar, editing, rewriting, extracting info from the bundles of Underground newspapers. Having once taught English to disadvantaged children, he was well equipped to deal with my howlers. What I judged first as mere pedantry on his part, I soon realised was invaluable in putting together a book. Jim and I worked from dawn to dusk, interspersing the hours of Olivetti-bashing with bouts of hard-fought ping-pong. Louise would cycle three miles to the village to buy supplies, and prepare meals. In her spare time she sat picturesquely under the sp
ring blossoms, making her way through Gone With the Wind. She had already polished off Laurence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

  Bridget Murphy, the new Oz secretary, dropped by now and again. She was dimpled, pretty, a bit impish at times and devoted to Oz, arriving at the door with thick folders of copy and correspondence. ‘Sad news about the Ozes you sent me,’ wrote a would-be overseas distributor. ‘The South African security police have been on my track, and all is very grim. Love & peace . . .’ Schoolchildren in Leeds sent a copy of their own Underground newspaper, Hod, and a report of its tribulations. The staff of Hod had been threatened with expulsion and a teacher who sold it outside the school was sacked.

  Turbulence continued at the posh schools, like St Paul’s, where boys were expelled for talking about pot in the corridors. At Rugby, fifteen were chucked out, even though the police were ‘unable to satisfy themselves of an offence’. To this, the headmaster replied, ‘We are paid by a certain class of parent who want their sons brought up in a certain way. It is our job to prevent extremes of modernity.’ At Oz, modernity was in the air we breathed, the grass we smoked and even in the ads. Pellens Personal Products introduced its ‘stimulant personal massager, uniquely shaped to body contours’ – the world’s first mass-market vibrator.

  John (‘Hoppy’) Hopkins wrote about a shoulder-pack video recorder (13lb) and hand-held camera (5lb) which had been produced by Sony for ‘educational and industrial use’. He predicted it would liberate the media. I commissioned a supplement on television, ‘the Bankrupt Medium’, in which a series of writers, including Tom Nairn, Ray Durgnat and the BBC’s Tony Smith, analysed the ‘failure of traditional media to cope with the consciousness of a new generation’ – a consciousness increasingly under attack.

  A glossy American magazine, The Great Hippie Hoax, was being widely circulated as a ‘public service document’. It claimed to ‘strip the petals off the flower children’, to reveal them floundering in a cesspool of sex, ‘half-crazed with weird drugs, parasitic, selfish, diseased and above all – coldly calculating’. It called for national action against the human plague. To put this in perspective, Alex Mitchell waded through the archives at the Sunday Times, and reproduced shock-horror stories relating to students and marijuana as far back as the Thirties.

  In July 1969, the Rolling Stones announced a free concert in Hyde Park. A few days before the event, Brian Jones was found drowned in his swimming pool at Crotchford Farm, his estate in Sussex. The concert was turned into a memorial event. On Saturday morning we took a break from The Book and caught a train to London, joining the throng streaming towards the bandstand. Louise and Jim were swallowed up by the crowd. Hell’s Angels guarded the fenced-off area at the foot of the stage, reserved for VIPs and the media. A mention of Oz got me inside. The compère was offering advice on what to do if we fainted and how to hold on if we happened to be watching from a tree top. Lost children and anxious parents were told to make their way to the boathouse. At the back of the multitude, where Louise and Jim were picnicking on the grass with a group of friends, skinheads jeered, and pissed on shocked hippies from tree branches. It was a first encounter with these blue-overalled, bristle-skulled bovverboys . . . but not the last.

  As the support groups heated up the crowd, the Hell’s Angels strutted their butts at the foot of the stage like a line-up of chorus girls. More and more people jammed the enclosure. ‘There isn’t enough room for everyone,’ lamented the MC, ‘so chicks will have to leave . . .’ Few stirred. The Angels were asked to do their duty, and brandished studded belts. ‘You too, Marsha,’ the MC called to a star from the local production of Hair, ‘give the girls a lead.’ A fierce gleam in her eyes, Marsha Hunt backtracked to the exit, but few followed. ‘Get ’em out,’ yelled a beer-bellied bikie. ‘But how?’ replied a recruit. ‘Do you want me to use violence?’ ‘I don’t care how you do it,’ snarled the Angel, throwing away his bottle, uncapping another. The girls stayed, and Marsha repositioned herself on the scaffolding. A butterfly fluttered from a pile of cardboard boxes at the side of the stage. A cumbersome TV camera was shunted along a pre-fab path, obscuring the view. Colour photos of Brian Jones were nailed to the trees – few of us realised he’d been unceremoniously sacked from the group a few weeks ago. The compère, Sam Cutler, urged us to ‘thank the camera crew for being so groovy’. Suddenly the murmurs from behind the stage escalated to a roar – it was Mick. In a white, bow-buttoned, billowing frock over tight pants, a gold-studded leather collar. ‘Yeah, we’re gonna have a good time.’ But first, a word from Shelley. ‘Cool it,’ he said, holding up the book: ‘Peace, peace, he is not dead, he does not sleep: he has awakened from the dreams of life . . .’ People wept, the music roared, the butterflies were released and floated off into the afternoon sun. Mick screamed that he wasn’t getting satisfaction, but half a million rock fans, including the skinheads, had a ball. Two years had passed since Allen Ginsberg, in this same park, had been hassled for playing that Tibetan squeeze box.

  Jagger was still in his party frock a few hours later when Louise and I found our way into the ‘performers’ bar’ at the Albert Hall. It was the last night of the ‘pop proms’. Two living legends were scheduled to jam to a packed house: Chuck Berry and The Who. To keep abreast of the heavy demands of hedonism, Louise and I swallowed magic fudge, at that time my preferred method of disorientation.

  Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ was one of the first records I ever bought. In the last year of school, I had jived in the locker room with a prefect, singing ‘Go Johnny Go’.

  Louise and I rushed to our seats: the thump of a unique guitar, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, It’s been going since days of old . . . Prehistoric gents with sideburns, Edwardian coats and velvet collars rushed down the aisle, clambered over each other’s backs and tumbled on to the stage, blinking in the spotlight. Chuck duckwalked for the Teddy Boys.

  After the interval, with the Teds chanting, ‘We want Chuck . . . We want Chuck’, The Who mounted the stage. ‘We’ll be reliving our past too,’ yelled Pete Townshend, screaming into action with ‘M-m-m-my Generation’, as the beer cans hurtled at his head. Relics from the Fifties, the Teds didn’t want H-h-h-his Generation. ‘Listen. We dig Chuck Berry too,’ shouted Townshend. ‘Now you dig us!’ With a flourish of diplomacy, The Who hit ‘Summertime Blues’: I’m gonna raise a fuss/Gonna raise a holler/Been working all day/Just to earn a dollar . . . And gradually, with Keith Moon spinning his drumsticks, Roger Daltrey swinging the mike in ever-larger circles and Townshend smashing his guitar on the stage, the crowd was wooed back to the present, to riffs from the rock opera Tommy. Teds rushed the stage to shake Townshend’s hand.

  We drifted back to Notting Hill, stoned and jubilant, full of hope, the tang of cultural victory in the air. Farewell to the Norman Normals, the dead-end jobs, the long, sad faces, the suits, the stench of conformity, failed marriages and bleak futures. Astronauts may have taken possession of the moon, but Oztronauts were conquering the earth.

  On Sunday we caught the train to the cottage. As soon as I walked in the door, I sat down to write an account of the non-stop twelve hours of rock. I knew Ed was on my case, but nothing could stop me, and impressions of the previous day flowed like Niagara. I sent it to IT under a pseudonym. Only later did I realise that I could probably include it in The Book, somewhere in the section on pop.

  The drag queen riot in New York that became known as the Stonewall Revolution, when gays began their long march out of the closet, never to return, was in June 1969. Its impact was slow to register in London, but gay liberation was in the air and we started the next issue as a celebration of homosexuality. Jim Anderson rounded up two of his mates and talked them into posing for a cover shot.

  With Keith Morris in tow as reluctant photographer, Jim and Richard Wherrett, a friend from the theatre world, photoshot their way through several gay hot spots. They drank beer on the pavement outside the Colville, in the King’s Road, cruised Hampstead Heath, and posed a
t the then trendy Piccadilly Circus urinals. Click! Click! Click! For Jim this was a public emergence from the closet, although like most of my gay mates from Sydney, he had been out of it for years. ‘Well,’ said Jim, ‘all bar the shouting. But that’s the hardest part.’

  A dire book deadline loomed. I hauled Jim back to the Olivetti and yet another Australian, Sebastian Jorgensen, a classical guitarist and freelancer with the Daily Mail, stepped into the editorial breach. Seb lived in Chelsea with a friend of mine, Tina Date, a folk singer from Sydney. Seb oversaw Homosexual Oz, and Jim and I ground through the final sections of The Book.

  In August, Louise and I took the train to Devon to stay with Ed Victor and his wife, Michelene, who were holidaying at a secluded farmhouse. Michelene was warm and sensuous, her freckled face peeping out through a coal-black fringe. She envied Louise and me, she said, because we ‘lived for the moment’; so carefree, in love and pleasure-bound.

  My millstone, the manuscript, moved from my hands into Ed’s. That night, the four of us sat around the kitchen table listening to Arabic music on my cheap Russian ‘world radio’. Ed rolled hash and tobacco joints, with me declining to get stoned because I couldn’t handle the nicotine.

  ‘Oh, come on, darling,’ murmured Louise, ‘your credibility is at stake.’

  ‘Too straight to write the inside dope. Is that what you’re saying, Louise?’

  In truth, Ed’s faith in the book was rock-like (his secret as a publisher). At times, when I had faltered, overcome with the weight of research, it was Ed who goaded me onwards.