‘How’s Oddjob?’ asked Caroline.
‘Coming down now,’ reported the flight attendant. ‘It was the roses – he’d never seen a flower before, close up.’ A Civil Aid operative edged through the tent-flap, his arm around the waist of a mud-caked woman with the eyes of a cornered rabbit. He guided her to a mattress. ‘Tineke,’ he said. ‘Dutch.’ Tineke had been having a wonderful trip, soaring through galaxies, riding on moonbeams. Until Leonard Cohen started to sing. You find he did not leave you very much not even laughter . . .
Later, I followed the Aid worker back to his tent. ‘These festivals are good training for us,’ he said, heating soup in a can, ‘like a rehearsal for World War III.’ Mass exhaustion, bummers, ODs, cold nights, minimal amenities. . . . He produced a folder. ‘I call this my pornography collection.’ He flipped through candid snaps of latrines at various rock festivals. With a shudder, I recognised scenes from the previous year’s Isle of Wight. ‘That’s nothing,’ he continued, turning a page. ‘Look at this . . .’ A man staggered inside, tried to click his heels and missed. ‘I am having a trip,’ he said in a thick German accent, ‘and I demand to be taken off it!’
I continued my rounds, stepping over shivering bodies in muddy cardboard boxes. The beer tent was shuttered for the night. A sign hung from the entrance: ‘Closed until noon – Watneys. Fuck off.’
It was way past midnight, cold and misty, with searchlights crisscrossing the crumpled crowd. Roadies scurried across the stage, making final adjustments to the sound system, piling up extra amplification. There was an expectant hush. A familiar figure shambled on stage. A little burst came from the guitar, people sat up. Silence. The tangle-head mumbled apologies, looking confused and frustrated. His fingers rattled again across the strings. ‘Hell, I just ain’t came,’ Jimi Hendrix muttered. It was sad and eerily moving. People were crying. I saw flames lick at his frizz, but it was a trick of the lighting. ‘Hell, I just ain’t came, yet . . .’
Charles Shaar Murray, the older-than-his-years-know-all Oz schoolkid, rushed up and shook my shoulders. He was raving, tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘The end, the end . . . we’ve come to the end,’ he wept. ‘It’s all over now. Gone, gone . . .’ Yes, baby blue, I felt it too. Farewell to the joy of Jimi, farewell to the fun at the funfair. ‘Everything I ever believed in is kaput. Jimi failed because we all failed. We gouge each other’s faces with Coke cans – we’ve created nothing, nothing . . .’ Charles staggered into the darkness.
By now, thousands in the audience were holding up torches and candles. Hendrix finally found his fuse and erupted: Hey Joe, where you goin with that gun in your hand?
There was Caroline, taking a break, dancing by the battery of speakers. Smoke rose from the stage. ‘We seem to have a fire,’ called out the MC, his voice tense. ‘Can someone help?’ A drinking-water truck pulled up as I reached the side of the stage. The crew fiddled with inadequate hoses. But the source of the smoke was a ship in distress flair, swiftly extinguished. A voice muttered: ‘Fuckin’ Mick Farren.’
Eighteen days later Jimi was found dead in a flat at Notting Hill, choked on his own vomit.
Louise returned from her holiday in Fiji, cheerful and recuperated, and grateful to her brother. She moved back into the basement and I threw myself into Oz with renewed vigour. It was the one conceived in Ibiza, the Fun Travel and Adventure Oz.
Wearing nothing but a floral wrist-band, Neal Phillips sat cross-legged in a field dotted with olive trees, a joint between his fingers. The source of his smile was obvious. Surrounding him were four naked goddesses, the ones I had met on his roof in Ibiza. This photo arrived with his copy, crying out to be the cover. On his twenty-fifth day of yohimbine intake, Neal had achieved new ‘miraculous heights’ of sexual excess, chronicled in ejaculatory detail, and concluding: ‘Yohimbine, your name is Ecstasy. Let it happen.’
The issue fielded reports from far-flung Underground spas and hot-spots. ‘Surfers form their own sub-culture in the shitless conformity of Australian society,’ wrote David Elfick from Sydney. ‘Surfers drop a lot of dope, make their own movies, their own magazines, eat their own type of food, design their own clothes and wish that all the rest of the weekend picnickers would fuck off so they can get back into the surf, stoned out of their brains, and rip the shore break to pieces.’
Michelene Wandor interviewed Wavy Gravy and General Waste-more-land, two famous US exponents of playpower, who were drumming up support for a British-based version of their Hog Farm, a travelling, clownish commune. Goats, geodesic domes, hairy woodsmen and lissom compost tillers were idolised in a rural collage, ironically juxtaposed with the Knightsbridge pages of London’s A to Z. ‘The hankering for material things, physical comforts, the emphasis on status,’ noted the text, ‘is from the old order, which is collapsing. He who lives by the will of God moves into the New Age.’
‘Crazy Otto’ was in town. The Austrian performance artist, Otto Muehl, had planned to ‘do an action’ at the National Film Theatre, following the showing of his documentary, Sodoma. Rumours of his intended act so frightened the organisers that they blocked his performance. ‘Muehl creates cathartic art,’ wrote film-maker Albie Thoms, reporting on London’s first festival of Underground films, ‘at a time when art has almost entirely been replaced by consumer objects.’ For Albie, the banning of Otto Muehl, whose weird actions were unfettered on the stages of Berlin, confirmed the philistine depths of artistic repression in Britain. To Albie, a heated defence of the ban, offered by shocked trendies, was ‘cop-out bullshit’.
When Hendrix died, we put back our publication date in order to include a memorial poster. ‘It was no surprise that Jimi split,’ wrote Germaine. ‘He was a long time dying . . . We have lost the best rock guitarist we have ever had, because we did not know how to keep him . . . If Jimi is going to live tomorrow, we have got to make up our minds to live today . . . We let him slip down the energy drain. Can we build fast enough to close it before we disappear ourselves?’
I was beginning to doubt it.
There was an obituary of another kind, too, for the spirit which sparked the first rock musical, Hair, long down the energy drain. It played to packed houses at the Shaftesbury Theatre, with regular rubberneckings by royalty. When one of the Hair tribe was sacked for ‘suspected’ joint smoking I comissioned a backstage memoir. ‘My first shock,’ Kate Garret recalled, ‘was being told to look pissed in the scene where we were all supposed to be stoned . . .’ The famous flag tableau where the cast makes love under the Stars and Stripes was dropped because of walk-outs from American tourists. The masturbation sequence was replaced with ‘smutty sketches and gyrating chicks’.
Behind the projected message of peace and love were darkness and dirty deeds.
On the morning of 1 October 1970, Felix, Jim and I donned school blazers, striped ties and short pants, hired from a theatrical costumier’s, and made our way to Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, where we faced a preliminary hearing into the obscenity charge. Scribes from the Underground press crowded the footpath outside, bitter at being banned from the press section.
The public gallery was packed – the result of gilt-edged invitations sent to Oz subscribers and sympathisers, announcing the first in a series of ‘obscene court room dramas – fancy dress optional – RSVP Scotland Yard’. The young prosecutor, Nigel Lumley, produced a folio of statements from newsagents, schoolteachers and others, eleven in all.
Cyril Pyle, the headmaster of South East London Secondary School for Boys, stated that Oz was produced by ‘sick minds’. Should the magazine fall into the hands of any of his pupils, he opined, it could not fail to corrupt them. The most ‘nauseating’ item was the ‘illustration of coloured girls on the cover involved in homosexual practices’.
David Offenbach, our solicitor, dark-haired and spidery in a Bermuda jacket and knife-edged daks, made a spirited plea for the case to be dropped: ‘The prosecution has failed to produce a single witness depraved by the magazine.’ (Not that
it was required of them, as I knew from rulings in the Sydney Oz case.) Frederick Luff took the stand. He had been promoted from Detective Sergeant to Detective Inspector and moved from the obscenity squad to ill-defined duties at Notting Hill police station.
‘Having now read the magazine several times, is your mind a seething cauldron of depravity?’
The chubby-chops crusader fidgeted and mumbled. ‘Speaking as a mature man – I don’t know.’
‘What are the worst bits?’
‘The masturbating teacher,’ he said, referring to a full-page illustration of a pipe-smoking military type fingering himself and a schoolboy. ‘And the advertisement for Suck newspaper.’ This was three inches of text, describing a fancy version of fellatio.
‘Has that corrupted you?’
‘Perhaps. It had a tendency to make me think about sucking penis.’
The gallery hooted. Luff reddened. The magistrate ruled that a jury would have no difficulty in finding Oz obscene and sent the matter to be heard at the Central Criminal Court.
Luff opposed the application for bail.
‘Why?’ asked Phipps, the magistrate. None of us had previous convictions.
‘They will continue to spread their filth.’
Bail was set at a hundred pounds each. We thanked David Offenbach, who reasoned the case would go before a judge at the Old Bailey within six months. Satchels slung over our shoulders, caps still set jauntily on billowing hair, we returned to the Oz office and shared a joint.
Cold November came early. Martin and I sat rugged up at an outside table at the Picasso. Chortling King’s Road dandies in high boots and high-collared overcoats waved and blew farewell kisses. Martin was flying home to Sydney.
‘You’re sick of it all, aren’t you, Mart?’
‘It’s sick of me.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘You don’t print my work any more.’
‘There’s only so much of Tiny Tim our readers can take.’
‘One day you’ll understand. He connects every . . .’
‘A joke, Mart . . .’ His obsession with Tiny was familiar to our readers.
‘And when you do bother – it’s ruined.’
He was still furious at the defacement of his double-spread in Oz 27 – Mickey Mouse greets Van Gogh – with its gratuitous insert Acid is good for you. These days his work was more for hanging than for printing – huge, luminous collages on sheets of perspex – art about art – which paid psychedelic homage to Max Ernst, Mickey Mouse, Magritte. Dozens of these had been shipped to Sydney for an upcoming exhibition.
‘No one in London would give me a show,’ he said. ‘It’s a sign to move on.’ He sounded hurt – who could blame him?
‘Ciao, Marteen . . . Ciao, babee . . . Ciao!’ A passing flurry of Italian fashion fiends, heading for the Club del Aratusa, blew a fusillade of kisses.
‘You’re like the pop mayor . . .’
‘No, no. Awful. King’s Road has turned into Carnaby Street. The musicians, poets, graphic designers . . . all gone.’ Eric Clapton had fled to his new house in the country, in his new Bentley. ‘It’s all show and no substance . . .’
‘It always was, Mart – a bit.’ In our first issue we had satirised King’s Road; later we got swept along by its colour, glamour, energy.
‘Yeah. It buzzed for a while,’ he said, ‘a new stoned avant garde . . . then it collapsed.’ Like The Pheasantry itself, soon to be gutted by developers. Sharp and his co-tenants had been booted out. Modish luxury warrens were to replace the expansive bohemian lodgings. Sure, the façade would be preserved, but . . .
The maitre d’, who had been eying us impatiently, came up and suggested that if we were having nothing more than coffee . . .
Martin stubbed his Gauloise in a saucer and we moved off into the bitter north wind, across the road and past the glittering façade of the Chelsea Drug Store, the latest craze from France.
Yes, Sharp found Oz a disappointment, no longer receptive to his way of thinking. ‘Sometimes you sound patronising about my work. What a laugh. You didn’t even know what the Underground was . . . until I pointed it out.’
‘What you pointed out were the UFOs.’
‘You think of me as an eccentric figure,’ he said, ‘effete, dabbling in a cul de sac, while you’re storming the barricades.’ He was grinning – it was the grin he drew for the cover of the very first London Oz. ‘Basically, your tastes are philistine – you never see what’s happening until it’s in the colour supplements.’
‘The magazine’s growing,’ I said, ‘evolving, but it’s never been closed to you. Maybe you don’t like Oz being open to so many others.’
‘If you let the brutes in, they’ll gang up on you.’
Sharp had always been suspicious of Felix. He was a bit like the party crasher Martin had depicted in Sydney Oz, the guy who raped and pillaged in ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’ (also called Dennis). But I was the one who had really let him down.
‘You prattle on about revolution, but Oz could take it so much further . . .’
‘Where? To your favourite hang-out – the Club del Aratusa?’ I launched into a political lecture, recycled Socialism cocktail-shaken with the Situationists.
‘Don’t start pretending you’re on Late Night Line-Up,’ he said. ‘I won’t pay you the twenty quid.’
I was a bit taken aback.
‘Next time Frost will have you on as a Weatherman.’
The Weathermen were an American break-out group of extremists who claimed that violence was necessary in the struggle against the system – bombs, guns, kidnaps.
‘Sharpie, darling!’ It was Birgitta, the crocheted critic from Ibiza, in a self-created coat of autumn shades that stretched to her ankles. Kiss kiss! Hug hug! Mmm! ‘Come back soon, darling. Your art is an inspiration to me . . . to so many . . .’
We reached The Pheasantry. I wrote a few words on the flyleaf of a book – Keep the River on the Right, by Tobias Schneebaum, an established New York painter who throws away his career to lose himself in the heart of the Peruvian jungle. He locates the Akaramas, a reputedly ferocious tribe of cannibals. The meeting, when it finally occurs, is an extraordinary orgy of spontaneous hugs and bellows. We were all jumping up and down and my arms went around body after body, and I felt myself getting hysterical, wildly ecstatic with love for all humanity . . . I twirled some of them around like children and wept away the world of my past . . . Schneebaum’s book had moved me deeply. ‘In between cruising the oyster bars of Sydney,’ I wrote, ‘dip into the work of an artist who actually steps into a world outside his own ego.’
Slipping the book into his carry-on bag, I hugged Martin goodbye.
Jill’s November wedding to David Leitch gave me a dose of culture shock. These days how could anyone contemplate wedlock? But Jill was my sister – if it would make her happy, then surely it would make me happy too, happy for her.
David was a brilliant journalist who filed a weekly column from Paris for the New Statesman. He wrote like Lytton Strachey in a float tank. I played him my personal bootleg of Van Morrison, and the hardened journo, puffing from a joint as big as a baseball bat, was transported to eye-rolling bliss.
Before Louise and I darted off to the wedding I tacked a note on my door for Jerry Rubin. Do It was about to be launched by Jonathan Cape and his arrival was imminent. ‘Stuck at a family wedding,’ I wrote, ‘make yourself at home.’
After drinks at the Ritz, it was taxis to an elegant address in Mayfair. I had never seen so many chandeliers. The champagne was fizzing, the Fleet Street luminaries were throbbing in black ties and tulle, like extras in a Fred Astaire movie.
David’s best man was Christopher Booker, a cultural adversary who had written The Neophiliacs, a book condemning the perpetual quest for novelty. Despite his association with Private Eye, and its relentless Ozophobia, we hit it off.
‘I don’t know why you Underground people bother to rail against modern society,’
he remarked, sweeping a glass of bubbly for me from the butler’s passing tray, ‘when it’s falling apart of its own accord.’ Before I could marshal a rejoinder, there was a fracas in the hallway. Three strangers pushed their way into the far side of the reception room.
‘Good Lord, it’s the Drugs Squad,’ said Christopher.
But why the Hawaiian shirts?
The butler offered champagne and was jabbed aside with a thumb. Jill sailed over.
‘We’re after Richard Neville,’ came a loud nasal voice, a heavy Brooklyn accent.
I was slow to realise who they were. It was a moment when two worlds collided. The tough redhead in the centre was Jerry Rubin, celebrity yippie, telling Jill he was about to rip down a few of the chandeliers. I rushed to intervene.
My sister hissed in one ear: ‘Who’s this mean-eyed little shit?’
‘A friend . . .’
Jerry hissed in the other ear: ‘Who are all these pigs?’
‘My sister’s guests.’
‘Fuck. Let’s get outta here.’
‘Calm down. Circulate. Interesting people, cucumber sandwiches . . .’
‘No way, man,’ chorused Stu and Brian, Jerry’s bodyguards. ‘We gotta a revolution to fight.’
Jerry looked round belligerently. ‘Let’s get the fuck outta here,’ he said again.
I waved goodbye to Christopher Booker.
Private Eye reported the wedding had been raided by three undercover agents from the Drugs Squad, using fake accents. Rubin moved into the back room of the basement and on to my phone line. His New York office urgently needed to be informed of his interrogation at Heathrow, where immigration officials had granted the yippies a week’s stay and wished them a happy holiday. ‘They’ll be sorry,’ he barked.
Stu and Brian had just returned from Algiers, where Timothy Leary was staying with Eldridge Cleaver and other Black Panthers, all recipients of political asylum on that stretch of the sunny south Mediterranean coast. Jerry was breathlessly debriefed. Tim had been presented with a gun at his fiftieth birthday party. The Weatherwomen had turned up for weapons training. Tim and Eldridge were going on an inspection tour of Palestinian guerrilla camps. Wow!
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