Germaine phoned the basement, sobbing. Could this really be Germaine? ‘Richard, Richard,’ she wailed, ‘I’m getting married in the morning.’
‘Are you ill? A fever? Where are you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. No one’s invited. I just had to tell someone.’
‘Who’s the guy?’
‘His name’s Paul. You don’t know him. No one does. Wish me luck.’
‘Germaine, please . . . Come over. We’ll have a party.’
‘He’s wild, he’s wonderful . . .’ Her voice choked again, and she rang off.
A journalist from the People, surprisingly polite, phoned to ask about Oz. He sought figures on circulation and profitability. Would we mind if he sent a photographer? The People was a vile organ, akin to the News of the World, rascist, mean, jingoistic and deceitful, with a horror of the unconventional. But their circulation was bigger than the population of Australia. Yes, they could take a shot of the editor.
For the occasion, Lee Heater, contacted at Wit’s End, agreed to be editor. ‘Far out,’ he said. All set to take the mickey out of the gutter press, he strode into the basement and donned a bright green eyeshade.
‘Right on, Dick, I knew you’d never compromise with the mystery tramp!’
Lee had never looked grungier. The photographer set up the camera, while the dreadlocked ring-in yelled down the phone, he really did: ‘Hold the front page.’ FLASH!
‘The CIA are running a drug ring,’ Lee confided to the photographer, hand across the mouthpiece, ‘and I’ve got ’em by the balls.’ On cue, Louise fluttered into the room, sat on his lap and put a joint in his mouth. FLASH!
‘Is your hair always this long?’ enquired the man from the People.
‘Nah! Just got back from a trip.’
‘Oh? Where to?’
‘Inner space.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘An acid trip.’
Discreetly stacking Underground papers in the background, I groaned. He was overdoing it.
‘Wow!’ Lee shouted down the line. ‘All of ’em naked and strung out on reds?’ He turned to the photographer.
‘Shake it, man, I got a party happening.’
The founder of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, pulled the plug on the British edition. He blasted the staff for being a bunch of rank amateurs ‘playing at publishing’, taking a ride on his own reputation and Mick Jagger’s bank account. ‘I’m sorry to say,’ he wrote to his London editor, ‘you are not even as good as IT or Oz.’ He then snaffled our designer, Jon Goodchild, and flew him off to a job in San Francisco.
In a piece for Oz, Germaine vented her fury at the state of the rock industry. (She hadn’t surfaced since her pre-nuptial phone call, but there were rumours that the husband had been abandoned. A new trend – marriage as a one-night stand.) Germaine lambasted Mick Jagger for not inciting his Hyde Park audience to take over the city. She asked why the crowd was peaceful and cleaned up its garbage. She despaired of the notion of peace, love and cooperation. To her, the Rolling Stones had been corrupted with money and the fancy vices of the upper class, expensive drugs and vicarious violence. The latest single, ‘Honky Tonk Woman’, was a new perversion, ‘a kind of self-conscious slumming’ – it stank.
On Sunday 7 September, the People published A WARNING TO EVERY PARENT.
‘Your kid may pick up a magazine in a discotheque or a record shop. It will look way out, switched on and hippie. It will contain precise details of sexual practices that make Fanny Hill seem as depraved as Goldilocks.’ [Pardon?] Worse, Oz was likely to print ‘advertisements of the three-in-a-bed type’. For the benefit of ‘square old parents’, the hack singled out Germaine’s earlier tribute to groupies, with its telling boast, ‘All the men who get inside me are stars.’ He asked, ‘Evocative for your pop fan daughter?’ Our ads were said to set the tone, especially the one for a ‘personal massager’. The newspaper implored all shop-owners, ‘Don’t help to spread this muck.’ The page contained three illustrations: 1. An ad for the vibrator – ‘The kind of ads that Oz has . . .’ 2. The cover of Oz 20, featuring the Hell’s Angel couple: ‘The kind of cover Oz has . . . a kinky embrace,’ and 3. A head shot of Lee Heater . . . ‘The kind of editor that Oz has . . . Mr Richard Neville.’
This page was turned into a poster for the next Oz. On the back we put a pink-toned pin-up of ‘Honeybunch Kaminski, 13, of LA’, by Robert Crumb, America’s most outrageous Underground illustrator. It was captioned ‘Jail Bait of the Month’.
Perhaps heeding the plea of the People that Oz ‘should not be freely distributed around the country’, detectives from the Obscene Publications Squad swung into action. They raided newsagents and visited our offices in Princedale Road, looking for Homosexual Oz. It was too late. The print run, 30,000, had sold out. They seized the few copies we had in the back room.
In October 1969, Jim Haynes closed the Arts Lab, owing to debts and the lack of Arts Council funding. The staff of IT took over the paper and shut out the editors, inviting the Piccadilly Street Commune to join them. ‘This is a vital move in the history of our time,’ stated a leaflet, ‘the UNDERGROUND IS SURFACING.’ It seemed so. The marketing manager of Rolls-Royce announced proudly that his top salesman ‘looked like a hippie’. The Piccadilly squatters promised to set up a newspaper for ‘skinheads, Angels, Beats and other beasties’.
In St Petersburg, Florida, the king of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, died of abdominal haemorrhaging induced by alcohol. David Widgery was on the line, distraught. ‘Everyone remembers what they were doing when they first read On the Road,’ he wept. At fifteen, in the Slough public library, David had ‘scrabbled through the K’s’ and discovered ‘a coded message of discontent, a sense of infinite possibility’. His voice was choking.
‘Suddenly, in a duffel coat, we could all be listening to wild jazz on the banks of the Tyne even though we never actually went.’ The booze wore off by Baldock High Street. ‘Neal Cassady was the Trotsky of his time,’ he raved. Just as Trotsky was the sole link between Bolshevism and the post-war revolutionary cadres, so Cassady was the only human link between the West Coast Beats and the post-Leary hippies; the Fabulous Furry Freak at the wheel of the Kool Aid Acid Bus. But Kerouac didn’t give a hoot about that. ‘Jack desperately wanted to believe in the Golden Buddhist eternity,’ cried David, ‘which he only found in nature – the wonderful still centre within his energy.’ Widgery pleaded for two pages in the next issue. ‘Jack was imprisoned within his wonder and his age, patriotic and pro-war – but I’ve got to write him goodbye.’ Calls like these reminded me why I was editing Oz.
Lee Heater was busted and hauled off to Brixton jail, trailing clouds of hash. Jim and I visited him; a dismal scene. Wives, kids, girlfriends all huddled in the waiting room, as the alsatians howled outside the window. ‘If I don’t get bail,’ he said, both his eyes blackened during the arrest, ‘they’re gonna cut my hair.’ At Marylebone Court, the bail was set at £1,000 and I signed a form – the fee was not payable unless the defendant absconded.
The Book’s stoned rewrite was finished. Lately, its working title had been Power Flower. ‘Sounds a bit off,’ said Louise.
An ingredient common to yippie street demos, altered consciousness, Dylan’s lyrics, group sex and the Underground arts/media scene was playfulness. It was fundamental to our culture, and it matched my mood. Homo Ludens, a classic work by Johan Huizinga, showed how much the glories of arts and science had been nourished by the instinct of play. Philosophers from Sartre to Schiller saw play as the culmination of liberty, the pinnacle of civilisation.
At high school, play had been considered a no-no. ‘Stop playing around, Neville, thwack!’ Class clown, school rebel, what a moth-eaten scenario, the only way out for a boy who was lousy at sport and loved the limelight. Anyway, I had a quick tongue, like my mother. Some teachers enjoyed bantering with the adenoidal extrovert at the back of the class, but others resorted to child abuse.
Sure, there were times whe
n I aspired to good behaviour, to win accolades and a special tie, but it usually backfired. In my final year, 1958, I was put on probation as an ‘acting prefect’, in recognition of long indenture (since 1949, from age eight). On the night of the school play, I double-dated with a classmate, Tim, and arrived at the school gates, very pleased with myself. The two young ladies, smoking and chewing gum, insisted on walking to the assembly hall by the shortest route, across a lawn. The headmaster rushed out with an umbrella, shrieking, ‘Out of bounds, out of bounds’. In front of parents dressed to the nines, he ordered us home. Instead, Tim and I went to the local cinema. It was showing an Italian art film, The Tail of the Tiger, which contained unexpected glimpses of nipples; perhaps the censor had blinked. The next day, Tim and I were denounced in assembly. The headmaster stripped me of my probational authority, but it was worth it.
This predilection for playfulness ripened into satire and for me it lay at the heart of the counter-culture. The title of the book fell into place: Playpower.
I delivered the final draft to Ed Victor at his office in Bedford Square, and stayed on to mingle with the real writers at the Jonathan Cape Christmas party. Ed professed himself happy with the rewrite, apart from the ‘boring account of the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park’, but what the hell? Playpower was rushed into production. The gnome who had toiled over the indexes for Cape since the turn of the century resigned in protest. Sharp drew an exuberant cover – a flying circus of joints, flutes, exploding hearts and toothy smiles – though the book was not to his liking. All that was left to do now was to complete the artwork for a full-colour poster, to be inserted in each copy. This seemed an innovative way to present a series of significant dates, gleaned from the research. I had contacted Jon Goodchild at his new Rolling Stone office in San Francisco, and he came up with a way to make the poster work as a game as well as a reference tool.
Jon airfreighted the artwork to London, where it was impounded. A caption contained the phrase ‘Fuck Communism’. I rushed to the airport, bowed and scraped, and somehow convinced the Customs officers that this was a work of scholarship. Which it was. Jon had divided the huge sheet into tiny rectangles, each one representing a month of the year, for the past five years. The game was called Headopoly. Players could traverse the board with counters, aided by instructions in the squares, e.g. August ’69: in Belfast, Bernadette Devlin MP admits throwing petrol bombs at police; miss a Go.
With a golfball typesetter on the dining-room table, Jim and I updated the board, right up to the final square, 10 December ’69: Senator Edward Kennedy disclosed that in the last four years, over a million civilians had been killed or wounded in Vietnam.
Felix Dennis came by to assist Jim and me with the fiddly bits of paste-up, flourishing cowgum and scalpels, while Louise took it easy on the bed with a joint, Let It Bleed on the turntable, delighted that this was absolutely the last night of my authorial outpourings. For her, the book had been all work, no play and certainly no power. Jim and I were too preoccupied to wash the dishes or scour the loo; and socially, rarely had the two of us found the time to slip out to a movie or dinner or even to walk to Kensington Gardens.
Felix and Jim were becoming like TV’s Odd Couple. One irascibly confrontational, the other amiably agreeable, they slipped into quirky rapport. The pair had recently collaborated on a recipe for ‘Poverty Cooking’ – Roast Trafalgar Square Pigeon. The suggestions for stalking and killing the game, and seasoning it for the baking dish, incited the mightiest outpouring of rage in the magazine’s history. ‘It’s just a joke,’ Jim assured phonecallers, day after day. The RSPCA were investigating.
Jim had survived a tough upbringing in the Australian outback, where his unaggressive nature had disappointed his father. At Sydney University, he dutifully completed his legal studies, and found fun and solace in a vigorous gay sub-culture that was aligned with Sydney’s bohemian Push. He too had been an habitué of the Royal George, where he had been dubbed by Germaine the Dancing Lawyer.
Felix was born in Kingston upon Thames and by the age of fourteen had been expelled from four schools. Before Oz, he had mowed lawns, mucked about as a drummer and worked for Harrow County Council as a gravedigger.
As usual, Jim teased Felix over the stink of his beard: ‘For God’s sake, take a wash.’
Stroking his brown curls, a gleam in his eye, Felix replied, ‘What’s wrong, Jim? Can’t handle the smell of cunt?’
It was three in the morning by the time Headopoly was finished and the lid was back on the cowgum. Felix asked to crash on the floor. At dawn, with everyone still sound asleep, I crept out of the flat into the drizzle, lugging the artwork off to a laboratory run by the Defence Department in a hard-to-find industrial zone. Specialists in aerial reconnaissance maps, they possessed the only camera in England capable of dealing with the complexities of Jon’s design.
It was late afternoon before I made my way home. I was not prepared for what I saw. The basement was a bombsite. Almost fainting from lack of sleep, I slumped on the rumpled bed.
The phone rang. It was Felix. ‘I reckon I should tell you that this morning I fucked Louise.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s moved out.’
I was angry and hurt, but I was so ashamed of this pain – which contradicted the theories of Playpower – that I shut my mouth. Felix went on: he had brought her a cup of tea in bed, lit her a cigarette. They chatted. It all happened suddenly, unexpectedly. Afterwards, she had started to cry.
‘Louise felt so bad about you,’ he said, ‘she freaked.’
Apparently Felix had calmed her down by filling her in on my infidelities. Louise had packed her bags.
Over the next few days, I suppressed my rage, throwing myself into Oz 25, commissioning stories, searching for a unifying theme – and a new designer. David Wills, a dark-haired London hobbit, gave the issue a look as psychedelically crazed as anything Jon had ever done. It matched my mood.
‘I’m so lonely. I’ve no friends. The friends belong to the past.’ An elderly woman in a Morden council flat left these words on the kitchen table, before putting her head in the oven. To me, Morden was no more than a name-as-a-dot on a tube map. In Oz, the Reverend Ronald Reeves called for a ‘revolution in Morden’, a bleak vista of ‘barrack-like training camps and anonymous housing estates’ which tortured its inhabitants with boredom and isolation. He demanded an old people’s charter, written by them and for them – ‘no demolition without consultation’. Reeves loathed the moralising about Vietnam and Biafra, when death and despair struck daily at the end of the Northern Line. ‘If the Church has any relevance at all,’ he wrote, ‘it’s got to lead the Morden revolution.’
Meanwhile, the hippies flew off to Ibiza. ‘A confirmation of a new way of living,’ wrote Colette St John, an old friend from Sydney, now floating free on the enchanted isle. ‘Everyone here has something different to offer.’ Barter had supplanted money, the frisbees twinkled and the cats were macrobiotic. ‘Our goal is Pure Joy.’
That was the goal, too, of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, a smash-hit fantasy. From ‘Underground sources’ we acquired an interview with Fonda, which broke new ground in its druggy candour. ‘I’m into communications,’ he said, ‘not entertainment – there’s no time left.’
An Oxford hippie busted in Tashkent for a smidgeon of pot wrote of his time in a Siberian salt mine. He entered the Soviet Union a ‘semi Marxist’ and emerged eager for free enterprise.
This Oz was turning into an ‘On the Road’ issue, though I didn’t consciously connect it with the death of Jack Kerouac. The obituary by David Widgery was rapturous and tough.
‘Kerouac and Cassady could talk each other into a state of semi trance, where their unrepressed word-slinging hotted up to a big shoot-out, bullet words whizzing backwards and forwards with words that were slippery without being gelatinous and made you tremble when you read them.’ By the end of his eulogy, David lamented Kerouac’s retreat into
quietism and weepy patriotism, asking readers to ‘blaspheme against his religiosity and be wary of his colossal nervous system’. Jack’s voice was precious, but from the past. We needed to fight America with all the science it was using to destroy us. ‘When we win, we can name streets and stars after him.’
And surely it was memories of Kerouac which had paved the road to Chicago. It was his mythologised attitude now in the dock, on charges of plotting to wreck the Democratic Convention. On the opening day of the conspiracy trial, when defendants were ordered to acknowledge their names, Abbie Hoffman blew a kiss to the jury. The judge banged his gavel: ‘Disregard the kiss just thrown by the defendant.’ Jerry Rubin unfurled a Vietcong flag, sparking a courtroom brawl.
One of the original Chicago conspirators was Bobby Seale, a member of the Black Panther Party. On his thirty-fourth birthday, Seale was presented with a birthday cake, which was confiscated. ‘You can arrest a cake,’ he shouted at the judge, ‘but not a revolution.’ Bobby Seale was knocked to the ground and beaten. His legs, arms and wrists were strapped to a chair. Surgical gauze was stuffed in his mouth, overlaid with bandages. Sticky tape was wound around his lips. Another gag was wrapped vertically around his jaw and tied at the top of his head. In the UK, only Oz reported this forensic torture.
Rupert Murdoch came to London and took over the Sun, an act which cried out for a comment. To a real-life spread from a cesspool tabloid found in the Deep South, we added the Sun’s logo, signifying its likely change of direction. Above the picture of a ‘doubled-headed freak’ – a deformed foetus – ran the headline: LEPER RAPES GIRL – GIVES BIRTH TO MONSTER BABY. The ‘teen mother’, formerly ‘a virgin’, was reported to be in a madhouse. The rapist, ‘Manuel’, was back in a Mexican leper colony. For the head-shot of Manuel, the instigator of this ‘foul mating’, we substituted a photo of Rupert Murdoch. Back then, the spread was satire. Today, it would hold its place in the Sun as the real thing.
Louise and I were still too angry to speak to each other. She was lying low in the home of an elderly relative. I kept away from Felix. As Oz was going to press, I chucked out one of his ad pages and replaced it with a lyrical snap of Louise in a field of flowers. For the caption, I pasted up the last sentence from Gone with the Wind: After all, tomorrow is another day.
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