Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  David Widgery’s Oz review of Playpower was brilliant but devastating. ‘Richard – you blew it.’ He found me square about drugs, prudish about violence and a raging reactionary about women. ‘Neville’s view of the sexual transaction is not so much advanced as insulting and it is all the more sad he doesn’t even notice it.’

  In the New Statesman, Angelo Quattrocchi penned a scathing farewell to a Dying Underground: ‘It has no morality, no philosophy and very little style.’ The American Underground was entitled to its revolution for the hell of it, he suggested, because it paid its dues. Not us – all we ever paid was its taxi fare from Notting Hill to the BBC, if it wasn’t on expenses. ‘Poor misguided children of Marx and Coca Cola,’ Angelo wrote, ‘you started by making fun of society, but now you’re making fun for it.’ The Underground had better change – or die.

  On one level, Angelo’s disenchantment with the movement was reflective of a more personal swansong – his relationship with Jill had come to an abrupt end. On the other hand, he had a point.

  On its way to New York, the charter stopped at Shannon Airport and gave me my first glimpse of the fairyland of duty free. The sound recordist in Copenhagen had shown me a stereo cassette player in a sleek case, with twin detachable speakers and headphones. Aghast at the wild expense of fifty-three pounds, I pondered the Sony instruction book for the rest of the journey, much to the annoyance of my companion, Jenny Fabian.

  The crowd at the Fillmore was spilling on to the pavement by the time our cabs disgorged their cargo of flared velvets and sequined boleros. Lillian Roxon flowed towards me in a silvery mumu and gave me a hug, gushing about the ‘brilliance’ of Playpower. Her own book, The Encyclopaedia of Rock, was a huge hit. I chided her on the omission of an Australian rocker, Johnny O’Keefe, which she promised to rectify. Lillian’s achievement was immense. In her tiny walk-up apartment, she gorged on gourmet tins of arcane delicacies, all the while tapping her way into pop history. As soon as I introduced her to Jenny Fabian ‘the author of Groupie’, Lillian began to blab like one. ‘The way I like fucking rock stars the most,’ she said, alluding to a recent evening with the Easybeats, ‘is sitting on their laps in a bubble bath and doing things with soap that no-one else has ever thought of.’ Jenny looked envious.

  As we settled into the front stalls, Lillian outlined her plans for promoting the US edition of Playpower. Her role in the universe, as she saw it, was to advance the careers of her friends and inflate their self-esteem. Throughout Brinsley Schwartz, who did not even live up to their unfortunate name, Lillian whispered sweet nothings in my ear about the beauty, loyalty and uniqueness of Louise.

  To my delight that Saturday night, it was Van Morrison who topped the bill. ‘Tupelo Honey’ poured through the auditorium and I flicked on my new Sony stereo. And it stoned me . . . stoooonnned me to my soul . . . stooonnned me . . . Incredible! Van’s never sung the same since, they say. It was a Tiny Tim-at-the-Albert-Hall-night, except that it was Van Morrison. And he thought he was James Brown. Too late to stop now . . . too late to stope nooowwwww . . . He soared away into some inspired ad-libbing, with everything from Astral Weeks and Moondance and more, blowing the roof off the Fillmore, the cobwebs from my soul and the muzzle from my superlatives. Plus it was all on tape.

  Lillian swept us off to Max’s Kansas City for a midnight feast of gossip, celebrity-spotting and cajun gumbo. The table turned into an Underground press convention, with the arrival of Sebastian Jorgensen, John Wilcock and our former designer, Jon Goodchild, fresh from ‘creating the look’ for Earth Times, an ecology magazine to be published by Rolling Stone. The babble, the dazzle. Nowhere else in the world could you down icy beers, soak up sweet treason and fall in love with chic insomniac strangers across a crowded room until four in the morning.

  ‘Each year there’s a new word which describes everything that’s going on,’ Lillian roared. ‘Can anyone remember last year’s?’ Jon Goodchild said ‘flower’, I said, ‘power’ and Sebastian said ‘disco’. Lillian shot out a string of yesterday’s favourites: liberate, free, alternative, head and freak. She fluttered Jon’s new magazine. ‘This is the word for today: earth!’ Boutiques now sold ‘earth clothes’, the clubs played ‘earth music’, Danish clogs were renamed ‘earth shoes’. And naturally, everyone now ate ‘earth food’, except at Max’s. Lillian claimed that ‘earth’ in a book title doubled its sales. ‘For the American edition of Playpower,’ she said, ‘you should change the name to Earth Games.’

  On Sunday, I took a taxi to the East Village to visit Jerry Rubin. His book, Do It, had been acquired by my publisher, Jonathan Cape. This cocksure, street-smart redhead on a roll wanted to know more about Cape’s prodigy, Ed Victor: ‘Is he just another hip capitalist?’

  ‘I suppose so. But he believes in the cause.’ Ed was always reminding his friends he was the UK publisher of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. ‘And he’s a true-blue Socialist.’

  ‘I don’t care about his politics. I want a hip capitalist – easier to deal with. Isn’t that what you are?’

  Ouch. I wanted to be the Karl Marx of the counter-culture, not its copywriter. ‘Judge from my book,’ I said, handing him two copies – the second one for Abbie Hoffman.

  In Rubin’s debris-strewn apartment, phones rang ceaselessly and ‘comrades’ buzzed about, their gear sombre and rough-hewn, without the frills of London’s Notting Hillers. Rubin’s comic audacity, which had so impressed me on first sighting, had a patina of surliness. For all the jokes in the transcripts, the Chicago trial seemed to be grinding him down.

  I mentioned the proposed charter flight of hip radicals. ‘Your trial as airborne theatre, without the judge. Plus rock groups, clowns . . .’

  Jerry loved the idea, but not the destination.

  ‘But Australia is still an ally of the War Machine, right down to conscription,’ I ventured.

  ‘What about Calcutta, man? That’s where it’s at.’

  ‘Is it? It’s on the way.’

  The more I argued for my homeland, the more Jerry’s glazed orbs reflected images of furry animals and tennis players.

  ‘Okay, okay. Sydney, but brief. An afternoon.’ He paced the floor, his eyes lit up. ‘Let’s make it a round-the-world flight – Havana, Algiers, Mozambique . . .’

  Sure – why not? Maybe he could bring a couple of the Chicago Seven?

  ‘A couple?’ He autographed for me a copy of Do It. ‘All of us will come.’

  Wow! The Magnificent Seven. And me.

  On the flight home, I flipped open Do It and read the inscription: ‘To Richard, until our freak circus conquers the planet. Let’s turn on the Third World. Brothers across the water – death to the Queen!’ I laughed. The seat beside me was empty. Jenny Fabian was up front with Brinsley Schwartz.

  Back in London, the blues descended, and each day began with a migraine. Deep down, despite its triumph, I feared that Playpower was a nine-day wonder. And it was past day ten. Louise had gone from my bed. And the allure had gone from Oz. Or at least the Oz office. Andrew Fisher moved to Manchester for a spell presenting a current affairs programme, so Felix replaced him as company director. Our relationship, on the surface, was chatty and affable as we consulted on schedules and apportioned the pages between ads and editorial, but nobody was fooled. Jim asked, ‘How much longer do we need to put up with this poisonous bonhomie?’

  One night, when I drove Felix home from the office in my sister’s Mini, I saw on his mantelpiece a framed photo of Louise. It was from our first weeks together in London, when we lived at Clarendon Road. I said nothing, in case she had made him a gift of the snap, but I began to suspect that his fling with Louise was less spontaneous than he maintained.

  I had the blues, but Jim had never been happier. Although he shared the upstairs flat with Judith ‘blonde bombshell’ Arthy, the West End actress, he was forever jetting in and out of the basement for imagery startling enough to jump-start the jaded Oz reader. After a while I realised that as an editor he
was more interested in talking to artists than to writers. He worked on the look of Oz, the pictures, and was in heaven haggling over the colours with the printer.

  Clad in sarong, sandals and his favourite blue and pink satin jockey jacket – I could never work out what Jim’s clothes were all about – he would sometimes decide I was a ‘bit sanpaku’, and whip up a macrobiotic mess of brown rice and vegs. I got it down but generally stuck to tomatoes on toast, shoulders of lamb.

  Baroness Wootton’s committee published its second drugs report, this time on LSD and amphetamines. It took a tough line on psychedelics. This led to a spate of headlines in The Times, linking LSD to sociopathic violence, the Charles Manson murders and the decline of the West. We produced a special issue to counter the hysteria – Acid Oz, the tenor of which was ‘No-one is fucked up by LSD who wouldn’t be fucked up by something else.’

  Manson, we argued, was a media pawn. ‘While the authorities usually apply their shears gleefully to long-hairs, he remains with his shoulder-length locks. Instead of prison garb, Manson wears his own bell-bottoms and fringed leather shirt.’ The killer gave press conferences with surprising regularity. ‘Thus the police and media offer straight society a ‘‘typical hippie’’ – fantastic sex life, heavily involved in drugs, but underneath a depraved killer.’

  Our centre spread was a flashback-inducing Sharptoon of an optically challenging Mickey Mouse meeting Van Gogh. Unfortunately, Jim, still not recovered from Lee Heater’s loaded pot of Darjeeling, added to Martin’s empty thought balloon, ACID IS GOOD FOR YOU.

  Australia’s leading Underground film-maker, Albie Thoms, introduced readers to the works of a performance artist from Vienna, Otto Muehl. Otto was against the ‘philistine porno world of the businessman’ and he assaulted the audience ‘to make them aware of their own perverted attitudes’. Films of his bizarre actions were considered ‘weapons in sexual liberation, to be shown in places Otto can’t perform’. This was most places. Sympathetic as I was to Underground cinema, Muehl’s blood-letting antics seemed sicko. In Oz we dubbed him Crazy Otto.

  One woman brave enough to pen a reply to Germaine Greer’s call for cunt power was Michelene Wandor, the wife of my publisher, Ed. As the mother of two small children she felt housebound and isolated from the scene towards which she and Ed were increasingly attracted. In her Oz piece, Michelene cited statistics of sexist oppression and defended the growing need for women to unite in solidarity. ‘The movement doesn’t seek the replacement of penis power by cunt power,’ she concluded, ‘or any generalised power. It seeks the involvement of all women, cutting across the class structure.’ A conference at Oxford had recently attracted 600 women, ‘sick of doing the dance of the ovaries’. Michelene asked, ‘Where was Germaine?’ A few of us knew the answer. She was writing The Female Eunuch.

  Removed from the petulant debates in our pages, Louise wrote from Ibiza:

  A full moon party the other night, out in the country, with the fiery ball rising behind the hills. I walked here through fields of poppies and daisies, and a peasant rushed out and filled my skirt with almonds. A fire in the courtyard, spices, incense, everyone spaced out on acid. Dashing Portuguese gypsies, spades from the States, Birgitta from Sweden knitting amazing crochet shawls. It’s incredible the things we don’t see or feel in our everyday state. The wind that was so irritating yesterday now caresses my skin like a fan.

  Colette threw the I-Ching: Two people are outwardly separated, but in their hearts they are united. Difficulties and obstructions cause them grief. When two people are at one in their innermost hearts, they shatter the strength of iron and bronze. Sweet are their bonds, and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.

  That photo was not given to Felix by me. When I asked him about it, he admitted nicking it from the basement. I wanted it back, but didn’t follow up. Yes, he likes me and he was sorry for me; but Felix is too proud to admit loving anyone . . .

  I miss you.

  Nicked from the basement, huh?

  I wondered what else Felix had put in his pocket.

  If I came to Ibiza, Louise asked me to bring incense and tapes. Yes, yes, but first I had to brush up the proofs of Playpower for the US edition, then spend a week at the offices of IT as a guest editor, the result of a plea from its exhausted staff. Funds were short, tempers frayed and police kept ransacking their premises. IT’s contact ads for homosexuals had incited the wrath of the Home Secretary. Charges were pending.

  Putting a newspaper together was a hit of adrenalin. Missing from Oz was the atmosphere of urgency and immediacy imposed by a weekly schedule. Wham bam, big headlines, big print, minimal layout – how refreshing. It would be like Tharunka all over again – on drugs.

  ‘Maybe we should make a bid to take it over,’ I said to Jim and Felix. ‘They’re sick to death of it.’

  Why not? Both publications under one roof, merging the production staff. IT for news, Oz for ideas. To me it made sense . . . but to no one else. ‘A lot of fucking hard work,’ snapped Felix, ‘which you’ll manage to avoid – and for what? More bloody fucking debts.’ If only my tabloid fever had died then and there.

  That April Paul McCartney announced his split from the Beatles and released his first solo album. Lennon had already told the others it was over a year before. ‘I was a fool not to do what Paul did,’ he commented, ‘and use the split to sell records.’

  Robert Hughes submitted an enthusiastic review of a new book by Theodore Rozak, The Making of a Counter Culture. Commissioned by the Spectator, a conservative weekly which courted fine writers, the review had been rejected. ‘You refuse to print it for political reasons,’ Bob wrote to the editor, Nigel Lawson. ‘If you want right-wing reviews of radical books, find some Tory hot shots. Maybe there are some in Greenland.’

  ‘What enraged me was not your review,’ replied Nigel Lawson, ‘but the notion of its appearing in the Spectator . . . it consisted of nothing but mindless ranting.’

  ‘Sounds perfect for us,’ I said to Bob, earmarking it for the next issue. Bob vowed he would never write for the Spectator again.

  On 22 April, a dozen or so schoolkids straggled into the basement, having answered the call to edit Oz. They seemed confident, sceptical, cheerful. One was a true-blue hippie, with a satin cloak and a job at the Roundhouse; another was a skinhead look-alike who contemplated a career in advertising. As Jim saronged about with cups of tea, one boy, Eddie, said that the only way to run a society was by a process of ‘non-pyramidal mutual co-operation’.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Trudi, a fair-haired girl with a handsome nose, rather like my own. She was fifteen, from Reading. ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  ‘Co-operation can work,’ said Eddie. ‘It’s been proven.’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ she insisted. ‘Without a boss, people aren’t capable of organising a raffle . . .’

  ‘What about the international postal service?’ put in Chris. ‘That’s an example of all countries, of all sizes, co-operating for mutual benefit . . .’

  And so the banter continued, the tea and biscuits went round and we briefed the schoolkids on deadlines and layout techniques.

  With his frizzy hair and a dashing kerchief, Charles Shaar Murray stood out, despite maintaining that he possessed ‘all the sex appeal of a mouldy sock’. He rattled off acerbic evaluations of rock groups I’d never heard of, and enthused about Martin Sharp’s record-sleeve designs. Charles was eighteen, also from Reading and a friend of Trudi’s. ‘The Underground has produced no literature,’ he said, ‘nothing since Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac – and they’re old hat. Pathetic, don’t you agree?’

  ‘I’m not much of a fiction fan,’ I confessed. ‘I couldn’t even finish The Naked Lunch.’ Charles was shocked. He was shortly to start a course in journalism, and I envied his career certainty. Much later, he recalled the meeting.

  ‘I was simply fumbling around in a darkened room trying to find a light switch,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘Oz was it.’


  Peter Popham was there, sitting on the floor with his skinheaded mate Deyan Sudjic, determined not to whine about how tough it was at school. Before him loomed A-levels and an Oxbridge entrance exam. Popham’s life at the time, as he later recalled, was ‘bickering over the use of swear words at the dinner table, calling my father ‘man’, smoking ill-constructed joints in the park, poring over Oz and IT in my room’. He was desperate to break into the Underground. ‘Oz opened the window.’

  Most wanted to write about the horrors of school exams, bullying and corporal punishment. But Robb Douglas, eighteen, from High-gate, liked his progressive classroom, where he designed light shows, posters and fun sculptures. He was in favour of compromise, of reaching an accord with the teachers. ‘A hand hold is better than no hold,’ he said; ‘with a helping hand you can always lift yourself higher.’ Robb’s fantasy was to see parliamentary right-winger Enoch Powell get a divorce and marry a black woman.

  We made our way upstairs to Jim’s backyard, where the hollyhocks were beginning to bud. Across the fence, the grunting Russian volleyballers were at it again. David Nutter stood by the tripod. The guest editors and some of our staff assembled on the grass for a mock school photograph, two of the girls donning boaters. I sat on a chair in the centre, brandishing a stick like my Knox headmaster, with Deyan giving me the finger. On my left knelt Berti, a fifteen-year-old from Aldershot who was sweet and pretty, and dreamed of living in a commune. Beside her was Vivian Berger, sixteen, the wildest of the bunch, a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed to have smoked pot at nine and tripped at eleven.

  Colette St John met me at the Ibiza airport, bosomy and peasant-skirted, her flowing curls windswept and bleached. Louise had flown to Barcelona to see an old friend, a Jesuit priest, and was due back in the morning. ‘Louise is high and carefree,’ Colette said, as we rode in the cab to Figuaretes, the salty Mediterranean breeze already lifting my spirits. I had first met Colette during the Tharunka years, both of us lost as we groped though the backwaters of suburbia in search of the Pen Club. Her father was an eminent lawyer who had acted for Francis James at the Oz appeal. Colette had street-sold Ozes in Sydney, and again in London; a woman always around when she was needed. ‘Louise is so calm and special and this island has woven its magic spell for her.’ The sunshine, the tranquillity, the ‘good vibes’. The magic of Ibiza, Colette maintained, was that it made jealousy absurd.