Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  Media reps crowded the basement for interviews. One woman asked Rubin if there was anything written in Do It which he regretted. ‘Yeah – the sexism,’ he said, updating his street-cred with enviable speed.

  Rubin’s disregard for the niceties of housekeeping, observed Louise, clearing away the beer bottles, the pizza crusts, fell somewhere between mine and Lee Heater’s. She was glad that Stu and Brian, who were closer in attitude to the Weathermen than to peace, love and the spirit of Gandhi, had found alternative billets.

  I was torn by his presence. Rubin was a street-smart prankster, whose war-painted pantomimes had knocked the stuffing out of HUAC, the McCarthy-immortalised House UnAmerican Activities Committee. His zest for rebellion reminded me of another redhead – a comicbook hero from childhood, Ginger Meggs. Still on bail from a five-year stretch for disrupting the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Jerry Rubin delighted in taunting authority wherever he went. Having already won the Academy Award of Protest, he was now scrambling to script the sequel. ‘Becoming a revolutionary,’ he told me, ‘is like falling in love.’

  ‘Yes,’ Louise silent-mouthed from the kitchen, ‘with yourself.’

  The obscenity trial was looming, there was a need to drum up Movement support, and perhaps at the expense of any critical perspective, I found myself absurdly eager to forge an alliance between Oz and the yippie star.

  Rubin was invited to appear on The David Frost Show. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘We can use TV to destroy TV.’

  ‘Why?’ Louise asked from the bed. Her current pastime was to lie about, stoned, watching Bette Davis re-runs.

  ‘My generation was reared on hamburgers and Walter Cronkite,’ Jerry replied, ‘so I know what a fucking powerful mother’s tit it is.’

  ‘Right on,’ I said, weakly, as Louise dustpanned the roaches.

  ‘We need to take the TV away from the control freaks,’ he lectured. ‘To humiliate the frontmen.’

  I mentioned my role in the live kidnap of the Sydney compère of Bandstand.

  ‘But we musn’t become bastards of the media.’ He inhaled deeply and passed the dead butt.

  A friend dropped by and congratulated Rubin on his book. ‘It’s too individualist and chauvinist,’ he replied, tossing a copy at the wall, ‘I can’t look at it any more.’ There was no keeping up with this guy.

  On the day of The Frost Show, 7 November 1970, the basement was packed with familiar faces. Jerry Rubin stood by the stereo, flanked by his burly cohorts, Brian and Stu, who were rumoured to have swung iron bars at police in Chicago.

  Jerry recounted a yippie stunt on The Merv Griffin Show, when Abbie Hoffman had worn a shirt made from an American flag, violating state laws. ‘The pigs from CBS blacked out his figure,’ he said. ‘Merv Griffin was shown talking to a half black screen.’ Scary. ‘The pigs censored his body, man, it was electronic fascism.’

  The plan was to storm the stage. Frost’s producers had allotted its yippie guests a dozen audience tickets, and the rest of us would slither into the studio via the green room. Mick Farren stood at the back behind bumble-bee shades and fingered a smoke bomb. Felix Dennis brandished a green, plastic water pistol. Warren Hague, a gay activist from Toronto and one of the best orators the Gay Liberation Front had in those days, said he planned to use the show to come out of the closet.

  ‘Again?’ asked Jim Anderson.

  ‘The media deadens our consciousness,’ Rubin continued. ‘Tonight’s our chance to shock the sleeping viewers into attention.’

  ‘Yeah – how?’ asked a voice.

  ‘By doing anything we feel like doing. We can be obnoxious, obscene, violent, horrible, immoral, contemptible . . .’

  Louise caught my eye and I knew what she was thinking – that won’t be hard.

  ‘TV turns everything into mashed potato,’ said Rubin, ‘including the slogans of revolution . . .’

  ‘Yeah, fuck celebrity guests,’ Mick Farren put in. ‘Tonight, we’re taking over the show.’

  ‘Right on,’ said Rubin. ‘Wow! This is Chicago energy.’

  ‘Let’s have a party.’ Mick gyrated on his stacked heels. ‘A party on live TV. The masses can see what our bloody culture is all about.’

  ‘Too much! Far out!’ etc, etc.

  Through the window we could hear the chugging of the taxis arriving from ITV, and wished each other luck.

  I sat in the Frost Show audience feeling uneasy – as did Louise and Jim. Caroline Coon was nearby, decked out like Rita Hayworth but looking like she’d rather be on duty in the trip tent. The rest of the saboteurs had made it inside, apart from David Widgery and Sheila Rowbotham, who at the last minute decided that the revolution was best served by them standing at the studio door handing out tracts on International Socialism. The ease of our admittance was curious. The White Panthers, now double in size, were still holed up in the green room. Mick Farren and a comrade liberated the contents of the vodka cabinet and discussed nuances of party doctrine with a clutch of comely researchers.

  David Frost welcomed the audience and introduced his three American guests, all exuding an air of punchy sullenness. Ill at ease, Frost fumbled with his clipboard, trying to pin down Rubin’s erratic rhetoric.

  ‘You’re just a plastic man,’ Rubin said. ‘Why stick to prepared questions?’

  Frost ignored this, asking him to explain . . . ‘

  Don’t you have a mind of your own?’ Rubin asked. ‘Don’t you want to get to the truth?’

  Frost looked dazed. Stu Albert extracted a theatrical joint and lit up. ‘Pot is part of the revolution,’ he said. ‘Here – try it?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  This was the cue for our stampede. In this moment of truth, someone said, ‘We’re either with them or against them.’ On stage, no one knew what to do. Suddenly, Warren Hague, his tiara askew, flung his arms around the host and planted a wet kiss on his cheek. ‘Sweetheart, greetings from Gay Lib.’

  Frost leapt into the aisle and pondered his clipboard. A London yippie with a Super 8 disguised as a video camera panned across the bedlam. An IT typesetter sprinkled the host with pink petals. Someone yelled, ‘David Frost is dead.’ Another, ‘We are all David Frost.’ Cheers, jeers. A piercing yell: ‘Fuck the media.’

  From the aisle, Frost turned to his next guest, Robert Ardrey, an anthropologist who had just published The Territorial Imperative, in which he claimed that humans could never shake off the programmed aggression of ancestral apes. ‘This proves my theory,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you!’ the yippies chanted.

  A man in a suit stood up at the back – it was the eve of Remembrance Sunday. ‘How often have you lot ever laid a wreath at a cenotaph?’

  Boos, jeers . . .

  Frost’s fury whitened his make-up. Louise and I shrank back to the wings, avoiding his eyes, both knowing how fairly he had treated me and my friends in the past. Caroline Coon stretched herself on the floor between front stalls and stage, chin resting on palms, like a moody poet. Frost opened his mouth to try one more time and Felix rushed forward with his plastic pistol, screaming, ‘Die . . . die’ and squirted him in the face. Louise and I were horrified – both wanting to die, die, there and then. Jim had a hand on Felix’s shoulder.

  Frost called for a commercial break. He and Ardrey disappeared. We milled around, our focus gone. After a few minutes, we suspected a trap, the enactment of a contingency plan. Could the cops be far away? As we ran from the ITV complex, sirens pierced the night. Frost began transmitting from a stand-by studio. ‘What you have just seen,’ he said, ‘is a powerful commercial in favour of law and order.’

  It was headlines in all the Sunday papers, to the delight of the key players. YIPPIE RIOT . . . INVASION OF THE POT MEN . . . THE FROST FREAK OUT. The Independent Television Authority announced an enquiry. Harold Soref, Conservative MP for Ormskirk, said it was monstrous for TV to encourage exhibitions of public depravity. The Sun’s editorial called it a ‘disgrace that David Frost should be gunned off TV scr
eens by a hippy with a water pistol’. The Daily Mail longed to see ‘courageous Frost punch a hippie on the nose’.

  The yippie threesome was triumphant. ‘Fantastic water action, Felix,’ said Rubin, back at the basement with a nightcap joint.

  ‘It was liberating, a catharsis. Shit,’ Stu waxed. ‘Up to now, embarrassing people to their face has been hard for me. Gimme a pig, I’d rather shoot him in the back. Wow, a water pistol . . .’ He laughed. ‘Thanks, buddy, now I’m a real yippie.’ He gave Felix a high five. Years later I discovered that Stu was the Yippies’ liaison to the Weathermen.

  On Sunday, Jerry Rubin phoned New York and read out the headlines – ‘The front page!’ he crowed, as Louise glared. ‘More than Abbie got for Merv Griffin.’

  On Monday I took the tube to St Paul’s and slipped into the public gallery at the Old Bailey. QCs in ruffles and bibs paced the floor, exchanging courtly arguments on precedent, punctuated with chuckles from the bench. Three forlorn young freaks sat sidelined in the dock. The editors of IT’s trial for publishing homosexual contact ads had begun. The prosecution argued that such ads would incite readers to acts of debauchery, hence the novel charge of ‘conspiring to corrupt public morals’. The gallery was deserted, the proceedings tedious and the defendants powerless. Just like the first trial of Sydney Oz.

  The IT editors were convicted the following day. Each one was fined a hundred pounds and sentenced to eighteen months in jail, suspended for two years. The case created little interest, despite the Crown’s successful revival of the archaic offence of corrupting public morals, a new weapon for the Dirty Squad.

  In the wake of continuing media rage over the Frost Show, the launch of Do It turned into the launch of the UK Chapter of Yippie. Reporters thronged the hall at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, radicals flanked the lectern.

  ‘The first public act of British yippie,’ Rubin proclaimed to the press, ‘was the disruption of Frost – that’s just the beginning.’ Stu gripped the mike. ‘We want to make a revolution and tear down the bureaucracy. Our plan is to liberate all of you, whether you like it or not.’ As MC, I opened the floor for questions. A man from The Times reminded Rubin his visa expired in forty-eight hours.

  ‘Everything we ever do is dedicated to the memory of Karl Marx,’ said Rubin. On Sunday, the three of them had visited his grave at Highgate Cemetery. ‘A lot can happen in forty-eight hours.’

  The Times: ‘We know what you’re against. Who do you support?’

  The National Liberation Front in North Vietnam, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen and the Irish Republican Army . . .

  The next day, the yippies flew off to Belfast. In the House of Commons, fifty MPs supported a motion condemning the yippie invasion of Britain. Mary Whitehouse called for a ‘widened’ enquiry into the Frost outrage.

  The front page of the Evening News announced YIPPIE KING IN SECRET BELFAST RIOT PLOT, as the Royal Ulster Constabulary zeroed in on his ‘hide-out’. Rubin thundered, ‘I have come to Ireland to foment a socialist revolution with my brothers and sisters.’ He discussed riot tactics with the IRA, and invited General Freeland, the leader of British troops in Ulster, to meet him face to face – no holds barred – in a live TV conference. On Friday 13 November, just in time for the late editions, Rubin was arrested and flown back to New York, where he thanked the British Home Secretary – ‘the butcher of Belfast’ – for his free trip home. As I later remarked to Ed Victor, ‘Now that’s what I call a book launch.’

  The elastic concept of playpower was overstretched by the yippies’ enthusiasm for the IRA. The Weathermen designated themselves my brothers and sisters, but they scared me. Okay, the springing of Timothy Leary was fine, but I hated that birthday gun. All too quickly, Leary had started to shoot off his mouth – ‘to kill a policeman is a sacred act’. Really?

  With this heresy swirling in my head, I sat down with a joint on a Saturday night and wrote a state-of-the-nation address for Oz, the state of Woodstock nation: ‘The flower child that Oz urged readers to plant back in ’67 has grown up into a Weatherwoman; for Timothy Leary, happiness has become a warm gun. Charles Manson soars to the top of the pops and everyone hip is making war and loving it . . .’

  On and on it went; a litany of all my doubts since the last page of Playpower. How my best friends, sickened by the festering malaise of the Underground scene, were cutting their hair, changing their paisley patterns, losing themselves in the front stalls of Noel Coward revivals. While Leary might say that ‘World War III was being waged by short-haired robots’; those who burnt you with bad dope, bounced their cheques, jumped your sureties, wrecked your crashpad . . . were not short-haired. On I raved: how the offices of Rolling Stone (visited on the way home from Sydney) were as icily functional as IBM and how its editor, Jann Wenner, was moved more by mammon than music; how Abbie Hoffman, briefly met at a recent soirée in Paris, tended to converse through his lawyer and was animated primarily by talk of book advances in Britain; how the legitimate new freedoms were being corrupted by selfishness, especially as the gonococcus germ hadn’t heard of Women’s Lib. In short, how we blithely declared World War III on our parents, while forgetting to look after our friends.

  ‘Feeling old and boring again, are we, Richard?’ queried Jim Anderson, as he glanced through the copy. ‘But it’s timely enough.’ He had just the illustration to go with it – an apocalyptic urbanscape by Jim Leon, our druggy eroticist – an egghead angel prophesying doom, working-class neighbourhood about to be engulfed by nuclear holocaust, a steamy fuck finale in the foreground.

  This issue came to be known as END OF AN ERA OZ. For the cover I borrowed Danton Hughes (Bob and Danne’s son), aged three, and put him in the hands of a slouch-hatted Ozworker, an ex-bikie from Melbourne, Pete Steedman, who strutted a rifle. A bare-breasted black woman wielding a semi-automatic smouldered beside him (Mynah Bird, later credited with single-handedly inventing the tabloid art of ‘kiss and tell’.) It was an up-to-the-minute guerrilla nuclear family, with anti-nuclear attitude. The caption: ‘He drives a Maserati. She’s a professional model. The boy is the son of the art editor of Time magazine. Some revolution!’

  Yeah, some revolution. But it was too late to stop now.

  15

  ZEN DADA

  The Rolling Stones blast from the speakers at the Kosmos meditation centre in Amsterdam, as two young women dance naked along the runway. Hey, you, get offa my cloud. Three hundred faces gaze from circular platforms in a spare white room, staffed by pale-skinned bliss seekers in Indian cottons. Usually, they teach courses in macrobiotics and yoga. One of the performers lies on her back, while the other kneels between her legs and lowers her face on to her vulva. Welcome to the inaugural Wet Dream Film Festival, organised by Suck, for which I am one of the judges. ‘Crazy’ Otto Muehl waits in the wings. Slurp, slurp! A few spectators stride to the exit – less because of what they see than what they fear they’re about to see.

  A naked man with a beard darts on stage, and drops his dick into the mouth of the one being blow-jobbed. More walk-outs. Nearby sits Jean Shrimpton, that dazzling icon of the time, attending the festival as the undercover companion of Heathcote Williams, raging poet, playwright and libertarian. Heathcote is the author of the Suck Manifesto: SUCK is all Sex is Good Sex. SUCK is an orgasm in every pore, on the hour and lasting for an hour. SUCK is the sacred urine rites of the Zuni Indians. Otto Muehl strides from the wings, one hand on his genitals, the other clutching a leather strap. He points Percy at his fellow performers, then redirects the stream at a woman spectator who scrambles out of range, too late.

  ‘Something real is finally happening,’ remarks the European editor of the Village Voice, Mike Zwerin, a fellow judge, ‘but I don’t think we can take it.’ Another judge, Germaine Greer, tightens as Otto’s strap swings against skin. Thwack! We’re all on edge, having heard the rumours that worse is to come, that Otto will decapitate a goose, slip a condom over its neck and use it as a dildo on one of his collaborat
ors, now writhing on stage.

  Eight libertarian loud-mouths had been invited by Suck’s Jim Haynes to judge this festival, dubbed the ‘Cannes of Cunt’. Fresh from my role in The Body, I was expected to provide an insider’s acumen. The movie had recently been released to derision and yawns. Louise hated her silhouette on the movie marquees – ‘a refugee from Biafra’ – but I thought she looked stunning. My own profile was replaced with that of a double. Of the sex scene, Private Eye announced, ‘His reputation was saved on the cutting room floor’, to which Germaine, in her Suck column, added helpfully, ‘Richard has never pretended to be sexually sophisticated, and after his performance in The Body he better not.’ Perhaps Jim had invited me here to upgrade my technique.

  As judges, we viewed three days of porn, trudging between venues guarded by cops, backslapping each other with journalistic bonhomie and avoiding deeper intimacy. ‘Tenderness, mutual respect, freedom and tolerance – these are all words we should associate with sex and love’ – began the manifesto of SELF, the organisation festival-goers were compelled to join to avoid arrest. The acronym stood for the Sexual Egalitarian and Libertarian Fraternity. ‘It is sexual frustration, sexual envy, sexual fear which permeates all human relationships and which perverts them,’ continued the manifesto, written by Jim Haynes. Leather bag slung over his shoulder, copies of Suck at the ready, Jim was always smiling, always touching, moving on. He made no distinction between stranger and friend, approaching everybody with an easy languid manner, in a remorseless fattening of his address book that one day would have him acquainted with everyone in the world. By the 1990s, I believe he was.

  The screen fest spanned the experimental, the Underground and the blatantly commercial. We watched German hunks groping junkie starlets. Fuzzy masterpieces showed wanking French felons in adjoining cells slipping straws between the cracks and blowing each other erotic smoke rings. ‘We were guilty with each other,’ Germaine wrote later. ‘By the end of three days we could hardly hear each other’s voices.’ Each judge was allotted twelve votes, to be distributed among various categories. Germaine awarded her entire quota to the 1954 classic by Jean Genet, Un Chant D’Amour, much to the irritation of fellow judge Al Goldstein, the editor of Screw, who called her ‘jerk-off Germaine’ and dismissed the gesture as ‘an intellectual tantrum’.