Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  From Devon, Louise and I took a daunting series of trains to the Isle of Wight Festival to see Bob Dylan. The event was being touted as the British answer to Woodstock, which had taken place the previous month in upstate New York.

  The crowd, enveloped in drizzle, stretched as far as the eye could see. Stalls sold incense, bells and overpriced ice-cream; illuminated yo-yos signalled the pot pedlars. Pliant phallic inflatables attracted goose-pimpled younger fans, who rolled in the cold mud with them. Paparazzis clicked. Sloshing and weaving to the front of the bandstand, we slid into the media fortress.

  On stage, tinkering with cables, I found David Widgery, who had weaseled his way there as a Trotskyite rep of the electricians’ union.

  ‘If one per cent of this celestial crowd devoted itself to throwing yoghurt bombs at the Queen or undressing in court,’ he said, waving a screw-driver, ‘we’d all be a lot better off.’

  ‘Surely not every day of the week,’ I protested. ‘A few days of frolics might remind us of our strength.’

  ‘You’re such a sentimentalist. You believe all those headlines about Woodstock.’ David wore a severe stoker’s jacket and house-painter’s pants with just a hint of flair. His limp, the result of boyhood polio, was barely noticeable. The years of agony had toughened his outlook and honed his idealism; one day he would practise as a doctor in the East End. ‘The highest aim of this lot is to serve in an oriental boutique.’

  It was not in everyone’s nature, I suggested, to follow Che Guevara.

  ‘Thank Marx! I wish his more obsessive fans would realise that our Sierra Mestre is the council estate and a skill at duplicating leaflets is more valuable than loading a chillum.’

  ‘Surely rock music is replacing leaflets?’

  ‘You mean all this blowing out of the jams and kicking away the stilts? The idea that Frank Zappa on every turntable will turn the world red is pathetic. It merely succeeds in making the record companies bigger.’

  ‘And the counter-culture bigger as well,’ I said, as a white Rolls-Royce glided to the VIP tent, disgorging another batch of portly silvertails with gold medallions and thick briefcases. ‘You’ve managed to get yourself the best view in the world.’

  ‘Dylan is worth any sacrifice,’ he said, casting his eyes at the sea of bobbing hats and headbands, and mockingly wafting away the incense, ‘even this.’

  Martin Sharp came tiptoeing through the slush, attired as a harlequin. ‘If only Tiny Tim was here,’ he said, ‘he’s the one who can link up all the generations, a true minstrel of the age, ambiguous, multi-voiced, an immortal innocent, the most incredible songbird in captivity . . .’ Yes, Mart, yes. Ever since the night at the Albert Hall, this is how Sharp had been speaking.

  When folksinger Julie Felix came on stage, Sebastian Jorgensen leapt to join her. Seb’s face went hyper as he struggled to strum a guitar. ‘He’s tripping,’ Louise said, concerned, ‘he’s off the planet.’ He hadn’t slept for weeks. With Goodchild and Dennis, he had been burning the joints at both ends, bedding down Homosexual Oz.

  To Ms Felix’s relief, Seb floundered off into the wings and came our way. He threw his arms around my neck. ‘Thanks for that fantastic freedom. I loved every minute of it.’

  Seb doubted he could ever return to the Daily Mail. ‘My Oz is rampant with schizophrenia, and I take full blame for choosing the cover. Felix Dennis is terrified out of his wits in case little old ladies in shops refuse to put it on display. Jim and I had to fight him tooth and nail to stop him changing it.’

  The bundles had reached the site. The cover showed a black man embracing a white man, up close, both naked. The issue was selling briskly.

  Seb started to weep. ‘The press is full of male pin-ups who communicate with knives and guns. I wanted to show bodies who communicate with love.’

  It was another naked photo in the issue which really surprised us. It was a shot of Seb’s wife, Tina, eight months pregnant.

  His main regret was a piece by Germaine, who had blasted an anthology of IT writings. ‘I suppose it’s going to piss them off.’

  Lately, IT and Oz had been moving closer together, with contra ads and bursts of socialising.

  One of IT’s founders, Barry Miles, had contributed brilliantly to this Oz. The images produced by the US moonwalk, he predicted, would change the way we looked at the world. ‘It’s time to clean up spaceship Earth and restore the natural ecological balance . . . the next generation will develop solar consciousness.’

  Robert Hughes, writing in the same issue, took a dimmer view. The moon-shot was the ‘greatest and most expensive public relations exercise in the history of man’. Billions of dollars were wasted so that ‘Faustian technocrats’ could leave behind crowning traces of evolution: plastic bags of urine, discarded boots, an American flag, a ‘plaque inscribed with cliché’. Bob wished that astronaut Armstrong, after planting that flag, had doused it with petrol and set it alight. ‘Impossible, alas, there being no oxygen on the moon. But if Luna does not justify a lunatic gesture, what will?’ The moonshot was nothing more than cheap melodrama, a wish-dream of the Industrial Revolution.

  The rest of the issue was more down to earth. A moving letter came from a ‘JF’ somewhere north of London:

  Dear Oz, Reading your mag makes me feel very small. It’s all right for the Living Theatre to take off their clothes, but I’ve got a few nasty spots which I am very embarrassed about. The fucking scene out here is non-existent, we have to do it with our hands which leads to a red raw tool and aching balls, legs and back . . . The smoking scene? One of the most efficient drug squads in the country. Then there was the time I turned up at the Arts Lab to see the Dylan film [Don’t Look Back] and couldn’t afford it. Fifteen bob for a fucking film. I was thrown out by some irate trendy who kept muttering about royalties. I thought the idea of doing your own thing would be cheap and for everybody, not just cliques. I can’t play guitar, write poetry, act or sing, and my understanding of politics and economics is very limited. So what happens to me in the great cultural revolution? In my nineteen years I’ve had three women, a nervous breakdown and some bad education.

  Can’t you people realise that twenty miles north of Oz, IT, Arts Labs, etc, NOTHING HAS CHANGED. What’s the fuss about? Do I hear smug laughter?

  Perhaps the Isle of Wight, where his letter was perused by thousands, might have cheered him up. Except the nights were freezing, all the blankets sold, the food ran out and the latrines stank. For the last hot dogs, the queue was three hundred yards long. Sharp was cosy in a nearby holiday villa with notables from the Chelsea jet set, but Louise and I huddled under a catering van, shivering in dirty clothes. It had its drawbacks, this ‘living in the moment’. Between acts, the PA played the latest releases, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and George Harrison’s reworking of a Sanskrit classic, ‘Hare Krishna’.

  By the third day, the media fortress seethed with discontent. ‘Don’t leave the press enclosure,’ warned the poet Christopher Logue, in a guttural shout, as superstars alighted from helicopters, ‘you won’t be allowed back.’ Threats emanated from loudspeakers: ‘Anyone not in Mr Albert Grossman’s party please move to the exit.’ The goons on the gates were doubled. A few journalists fainted. The chaos delayed the show and missiles flew at us from the crowd. Louise bunched up her black velvet dress and peed. Ritchie Havens sang and played his guitar. His voice was curdled molasses: ‘Outasight – you’re all beautiful. You’re groovy. You’re outasight. You’re all beautiful because you’re people. And people are. People are people are people. Groovy.’ Tumultuous cheers; a rain of apple cores and Coke cans.

  One other person penetrated the media sanctum – a woman from the throng who threw off all her clothes except for love beads and a wispy scarf. She was manhandled over the heads of cheering spectators until she reached the barbed wire. Her smile was wide, her eyes adorned with ‘happening’ spectacles. A phalanx of photographers hauled her over the fence and into their arms.

  Delays, more miss
iles; the Stones and the Beatles squashed themselves into the front row. Bob Dylan shuffled on stage in a white suit and stared at the ground, mumbling tracks from his dour new album, John Wesley Harding. To almost everyone he was a distant speck, his message blowin’ in the wind. An armoured van idled backstage. It was rumoured he had refused to appear until receiving his fee in advance: £38,000. Dylan snarled through ‘Rainy Day Woman’, ‘Ramona’, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, his new Johnny Cash style robbing them of emotional impact. Huddled around huge bonfires of rubbish, including parts of the fence, 200,000 fans tried not to feel anti-climactic. When Dylan launched into ‘Minstrel Boy’, a track from his album Self Portrait, Sharp dug in his pocket for a piece of silver. At the line, ‘Please throw a coin to the poor minstrel boy’, Sharp flicked a florin, which clattered on stage next to the mike, and into musical history. ‘A zen moment,’ Martin said later. (On a later live bootleg, the tinkle is a highpoint.) And as for the naked woman who walked on a sea of heads, her feat appeared later as a full-page ad in Oz for the rock group Free. Media historians believe it paved the way for Rupert Murdoch’s money-spinning invention in the Sun – the Page Three Girl.

  British Rail wasn’t up to the return trip. The notion of a festival coming to an end and the crowd surging home took them by surprise. The station was a refugee camp, with everyone cold, wet, hungry and stupefied. Luckily, we met Sam Hutt, a young doctor inclined to homeopathy and country music (the future ‘Hank Wangford’, Britain’s loopiest country and western singer). Dr Hutt’s kit contained a large bottle of green liquid, available on prescription – a tincture extracted from cannabis. The rest of the journey is blank.

  We unlocked the kitchen door and the phone rang. It was Ed Victor. The book’s good, he said, but . . .

  ‘Yes, Ed, I know, like the stodgy British left.’

  ‘Your voice is there, Dick, but make it looser. Much looser. How many days do you want?’

  ‘Jim and I are already on the case, Ed.’ My tone was breezy, but it was a blow.

  A weatherbeaten face draped in dreadlocks barged into the kitchen. ‘Wow, man . . . far out. Where were you? I was on acid the whole time . . .’ Oh, God. It was Lee Heater, last seen being bundled down an alley in Marrakesh. He had found his way to the Isle of Wight. ‘Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail,’ he said, recounting the apparition of Dylan, ‘the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder. Wow!’ Lee wanted to crash in the basement.

  12

  a WARNING to EVERY PARENT

  In a BBC interview, Prince Charles said his mother was a ‘marvellous person, with a marvellous sense of humour, who was terribly sensible and wise’. This led Valerie Jenkins of the Evening Standard to conclude that Charles ‘did not give one fig’ for the generation gap. She wondered how this mirrored the attitudes of his near contemporaries, so she knocked at my door. ‘Mum loathes Oz,’ I told her, ‘and she’s scathing about youth.’

  ‘Thanks for the write-up’, Mum replied in a rare note. ‘Nobody here agrees with you that I’m critical of young people. They flow through my door in ever increasing numbers. Are they masochists?’ Mum wanted to know when I – or Jill – would make it home for a visit. It was impossible to say. She was down under on a mountain top; I was on edge in the Underground.

  Everyone was sick to death of The Book. Too stuffy, huh? By coaxing others to roll joints of the magical tobacco-less grass, I could inhale deeply and pound like a pianist. If Abbie Hoffman could write a bestseller in three days, surely I could rewrite one in three weeks, especially with Jim at the second Olivetti. The joker in the pack was Lee Heater.

  Once installed in the back room, he was difficult to budge. A fish tank appeared, buzzing with an electric pump, frothing with tropic exotica. Next came three newborn kittens and a mangy mother with festering lumps under her fur. He clogged the phone with saccharine calls to his wife in California, an elderly ‘heiress’. Strangers streamed into the basement, lured by his impassioned street-corner raves. Lee’s chillum was never empty. One night, the visiting son of a lord got so out of it that he started to smear his shit on our walls.

  ‘Party’s over, Lee,’ said Louise.

  He stood in the garbage bay, thumping his head against the bricks and crying, ‘Ozzies in the basement/Mixing up the medicine/I’m on the pavement/Thinking about the Government . . .’

  Okay, Lee, Okay. ‘One more day.’

  Why did I tolerate this perverse incarnation of freakdom, this one-man Living Theatre? Rebellion in the head was a cop-out, I felt, unless it was road-tested. Slumped at a desk trying to type up a storm, it encouraged me to know there were foot-soldiers for freedom out there, bashing their heads against the walls – whether basement or Bastille.

  Autumn of ’69 was the time of the Fabulous Freak – John and Yoko, the Easy Riders, the Yippies, the Vietloons, the romanticised patients of mystic psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Previously shunned for their eccentricity, freaks were seen to be ahead of their time, and given their head. Even my alma mater, the University of New South Wales, had, in a brilliant stroke of student/staff PR, put an official wizard on its payroll, Ian Channell. He landed in London with whistles and toys and theories of fun, inciting a splash in the Mirror. The next Oz was dedicated to these fabulous freaks, ‘anti-hypocrites who abolish the barriers between theory and action, reality and fantasy, politics and play’. Lee Heater’s face adorned the cover, his tongue thrust out. The Oz logo, in minuscule type, was stuck to its tip like a tab of acid. ‘As the global village plugs us into the same experiences, we risk becoming the same person . . . freaks restore variety.’ As we were putting the issue to bed, we heard that Francis James, one of the first fabulous freaks of my acquaintance, the sometime printer of Sydney Oz, had been arrested and jailed in China, accused of being a spy. The Chinese were in for a rough trot – as houseguests, freaks could be hell.

  One night, in the thick of conflicting deadlines, Lee dropped LSD into the teapot. By the time his hovering gleam had alerted Louise and myself, Jim had started on a second cup. I hit the roof. Lee hustled Jim into the back room with a pile of cassettes – Pink Floyd, Love’s Forever Changes, the Grateful Dead, the cats, the tank of tropical fish and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Twenty-four hours later, he staggered out reborn, swearing he had soared to the outer reaches of ecstasy, and in awe of the pilot. When I berated Lee for screwing up life in the basement, he clenched his fist and shoved his lips to my face: ‘All your blather about revolution,’ he shouted, ‘is just worthless foam from the mouth.’ Shut me right up.

  He handed a peace offering to Louise: ‘It’s just an itsy bitsy little high.’

  By the time we arrived at Claire and Nicholas Tomalin’s smart Hampstead dinner party, the lump of opium he had given her to eat was making her nauseous. All through the night, as I laboured at literary games with New Statesman regulars, involving books of quotations and complicated puns, Louise could be heard retching in the lavatory. The other guests studiously failed to notice, until the hostess inquired politely, ‘Morning sickness?’

  When we got home, Louise flew at our houseguest from hell. ‘Get out! Get out, now!’

  Lee produced a mirror and held it to her face. ‘That’s you, honey. Hate!’

  In the morning, I grabbed the phone, and found Lee new quarters. ‘Don’t worry,’ breezed a voice as I tried to soften them up, ‘we’ve already had The Living Theatre.’ It was a boarding house called Wit’s End.

  In September 1969, a deserted eighteenth-century mansion near the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane was occupied by a raggle-taggle band of street kids. Its doors were opened to London’s homeless. Food was donated, children played in the debris. ‘We are the secret agents of a future society,’ announced a spokesman, ‘free from the degradation of work.’ Hell’s Angels guarded the doors. It was a new movement. If Cathy couldn’t come home, she could squat.

  In Chicago, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and others were charged with conspiracy to disrupt
the Democratic Convention. John Lennon’s ‘Come Together’, the hit song of the Beatles album Abbey Road, was picked up by Timothy Leary as a campaign song during his run for Governor of California, but Leary, now on bail, couldn’t come to London – he was turned back at the airport. In Amsterdam, Jim Haynes launched Europe’s first sex paper, Suck, which styled itself as an ‘alternative to the kind of mind that could create obscenity laws’. It published the famous ‘gobble poem’ by W.H. Auden, and ‘Sucky Fucky’, a gossip column by Germaine Greer, under the pen name Earth Rose. The lead items took her friends by surprise. ‘Anyone who wants group sex in New York and likes fat girls, contact Lillian Roxon . . . Mick Farren has just recovered from a case of clap. However, knowing his foreskin and disinclination to wash, he is still a risk . . . The belt of Mel Clay of the Living Theatre is once again whistling down the arched white thighs of Danne Hughes . . . Martin Sharp does not like giving head, you have been warned . . .’

  Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki, a nymphet, remarking, ‘I am sixteen years old at heart.’ Since the starry night at the Albert Hall, Tiny’s career had plummeted, but this only further inflamed the ardour of his greatest fan. Martin Sharp asked Louise and me to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Luton, so that he could present the songster with a personal tribute. Louise’s firm memory is that Sharp hired a Rolls-Royce. Martin insists it was a regular limo. I thought it was a Mini Moke. Anyway, we arrived and loitered at the stage door of Caesar’s Palace, a working men’s club, and tried not to look like the Plaster-Casters.

  Eventually, Sharp wangled a meeting. He praised Tiny for the protean nature of his genius and sent me to get his gift, a memento from his Exploration of Punctuation period. It was huge, it was heavy. I hauled it backstage, where it was presented to the astonished warbler. A long silence. Tiny shook his head. ‘Oh, what a shame, Mr Sharp, it doesn’t fit into my shopping bag.’