Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  In her high-laced boots and a first fur coat – The Female Eunuch was a hit – Germaine stood her ground: ‘It is the only film which could have liberated me to drink the sperm of every man and sip the juice of every woman in the room.’

  On the previous night she had made a start, rolling about naked with Heathcote Williams at the BBK Cinema, during a documentary on Otto Muehl and his ‘cathartic’ performance art. SUCK is galvanising Pussy Power into bombing the Playboy Club and seizing the site for Suck City. Germaine, her eyebrows newly plucked like Marlene Dietrich’s, readied her lips for Heathcote. Other cineastes pushed forward, only to scatter as the arc lights and boom mikes of Suck’s own porn unit destroyed the mood. ‘We wilted and shrank into ourselves,’ Germaine reported. ‘Only Heathcote remained dancing, like some faun or satyr against the body loathing of Otto Muehl. We needed magic and only Heathcote had it. As events later proved.’

  At the Kosmos, after Otto had reddened the buttocks of his fellow performers, he ‘went down’ on one of the women, extracting her tampon with his teeth. A man stormed to the door, yelling, ‘So this is how low we’ve sunk.’ Otto passed the tampon to his bearded colleague, who ate it. I muttered to Zwerin, ‘No accounting for taste.’ The two women positioned themselves on all fours, back to back, while Otto connected them with a rolling pin. His sex slaves rammed each other rhythmically, as Otto shouted to the gods, ‘Can’t anyone here give me an erection?’ No one said a word, not even Germaine.

  Otto drew a squawking goose from a bag, gripping its scrawny legs (not unlike his own) as it flapped its wings. SUCK is Group Sex, Police Sex, Animal Sex, Teeny Sex, One Armed Bandit Sex, Geriatric Sex and Cosmic Sex. The atmosphere was electric. Most of the audience knew what Otto intended, more or less. Albie Thoms had championed his cause in the pages of Oz – sweet-natured Albie, the mildest mannered of freaks, now up the back aiming the spots. If only the cop who had arrested him in Sydney in ’63 for staging a Revue of the Absurd could see this – beyond the absurd.

  ‘Otto Muehl functions as Zen Dada,’ Albie had told me earlier, as we strolled by the canals to the BBK Cinema, intent on a theft. ‘He likes freaking out his audience, testing their tolerance.’ We slid into the side door and up to the projection booth, where Albie rustled around for the footage. ‘Otto is the bravest of them all. He cuts right to the dilemma of artistic man in a materialist world.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ I urged, waving the scissors. I could see the cops position themselves outside, prior to the next festival screening.

  Albie unrolled the film, holding it up to the light. ‘The most we can pinch is three frames.’ He was uneasy. As Film Co-ordinator of the festival, he was betraying a trust for the sake of an old friend.

  ‘Cut it, for God’s sake.’

  No one would miss it. Sandy Lieberson, the producer of Mick Jagger’s latest, soon-to-be-released film, Performance, had smuggled the censored offcuts here for a festival premiere. The scene of Jagger in bed with Anita Pallenberg had revealed a salami-sized penis and a scrotum as big as a sugar melon. I wanted to print the full frontal in Oz as a pin-up; a world scoop; an answer to feminist scolds who said we only showed tits. Snip, snip, the deed was done, and we sprinted back to the Kosmos.

  Sitting here now, in the front stalls, I finger the minuscule frames of Mick’s mighty manhood and watch the goose flapping its wings. I too am terrified. Albie calls it ‘that awe-ful fear’. Only Otto can unleash the terrifying mystery of the theatre of cruelty, he says, one that Artaud had theorised about before the war, before the bomb, before Vietnam. Muehl swings the squawking goose, the people in the front back off. Most of the faces in the dwindling crowd turn away from the stage. Who are we? Brave witnesses at the cutting edge of artistic catharsis or sordid conspirators in the senseless debauch of an innocent? SUCK is Stalin’s flying wang being stroked by Nijinsky. Muehl’s carving knife glints. Fists shake from the back stalls. Otto Muehl once taught maths at a High School in Vienna. Squawk, squawk, squawk. Uncorking the kitchen implement, one of the women writhes on her back, spread-eagled, expectant. AAAhhhhhh! Thump! Heathcote Williams leaps to the stage, his hair flying, knocks Otto off the edge, grabs the goose, falters, passes it to a lobster-skinned British journalist, Anthony Haden-Guest, who dashes madly for the exit with the honking bird. Silence; then uproar.

  With others, I swarm to the front. The dazed Austrian clambers on to the stage, where he is confronted by Heathcote’s taunting suppporters. ‘If you kill that goose,’ one of them shouts, belatedly, ‘we’ll fucking kill you.’ Another voice screams, ‘Nazi pig.’ Heathcote stands there, head bowed and weeping. Germaine sweeps to his side, her face radiating gratitude, compassion, even love.

  ‘What a bunch of puritan hypocrites,’ Albie Thoms shouts, moving towards Otto, who is rubbing a gash on his shoulder. ‘You’re prepared to kill an artist to save a goose – a goose you’d eat for dinner.’ As for Otto – his goose is cooked already.

  A voice aims at Heathcote: ‘You uptight public school bastard.’

  ‘Only Heathcote had the courage to stop the violence,’ Germaine shrieks. ‘Muehl’s antics are sadistic and stupid.’

  ‘How dare you censor my experience,’ cries Mel Clay, a former member of the Living Theatre. ‘You two of all people . . .’ Danne Hughes, her blue eyes burning, hisses her disapproval of the interruption. It’s a fumbling, self-conscious sell-out, she thinks, a betrayal of the artist.

  The poet is too shaken to reply. Later, he will write, ‘I saved the goose because it was merely being used to shock the hipoisie and not for divination. I saved the goose because I wanted to become the media for a second and see what it was like. I saved the goose because we are all one flesh.’

  Albie asks Germaine, ‘How could you fall for this RSPCA crap?’

  ‘Six million Jews went to the gas chambers, because of pigs like Otto.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Germaine,’ shouts Jay Landesman, a Jew and a festival judge.

  ‘You of all people shouldn’t stand by while this butcher . . .’

  ‘You’re supposed to be a libertarian,’ shouts Albie, shaking with rage. His anger stemmed from deep conviction. He saw in Otto not only the legacy of Dada and Surrealism but the inspiration behind the guitar-trashing antics of Pete Townshend and other pop performers, who had imbibed ‘cathartic actions’ at art school. Admiring the commitment of both sides, I feel stunted and indecisive, a tongue-tied bystander at an artistic flashpoint, all too relieved to be spared the sight of spilt blood. ‘What about tolerance for the artist?’ continues Albie, coldly surveying the critics. ‘Otto has suffered more for his art than all you élitist creeps put together.’

  ‘I disclaim violence,’ Germaine insists, towering over him. ‘I will not sit through it in the name of art.’

  She had recently sat through the London première of Albie’s prizewinning movie, Marinetti, a sympathetic portrait of the founder of Futurism (the forerunner of Dadaism and Surrealism). Futurism called for the discarding of all traditions and the creation of new forms of expression. It exalted modern technology, speed, violence and war. Germaine was fulsome in her praise of his movie, but after tonight, she will write of Albie, ‘He is a pompous, pretentious preacher from down under, where censorship is most brutal and there is no class but the bourgeoisie.’

  ‘Otto Muehl kills geese and pigs and shoves their innards up women’s cunts,’ Heathcote will write, ‘because he can’t afford the fare to My Lai.’

  A voice from the crowd: ‘We’ve wallowed so much in our animal nature in the last few days, that we can now identify with animals directly. We are all geese – Heathcote saved us.’

  In a documentary shown at the festival, A Summer Day, the identification with animals was literal. Bodil Joensen, a farm girl from a loveless family, demonstrates how she masturbates her horse, fucks her dog and performs fellatio on the corkscrew penis of her pet pig. ‘I sweeten the life of my animals,’ she says, ‘for them it’s a nice change from artificial inseminati
on.’ Bodil wears the locket of a dog around her neck, a lost love of childhood – ‘I have not cried since his death.’

  Albie Thoms says he is privileged to have seen Otto’s work. ‘I return to my own country inspired by his freedom and courage.’

  ‘I saved the goose because sadomasochism has more to do with ego than libido,’ says Heathcote. ‘I saved the goose because the theatre is impotent without interruption.’

  Eventually, the white-faced meditators from Kosmos herd us to our seats, as an alternative climax to Otto’s performance is improvised. The artist whips the flesh of his cast with renewed fury, then stabs at the stage with a carving knife, yelping and barking at the audience in German. He turns his back on the crowd, squats and drops a turd. Albie comments to Germaine with satisfaction, ‘He’s just shat in your face.’

  This last act inflames the staff of Kosmos, who rush to the stage and hurl themselves at the four performers, fists flying, lips foaming. ‘Clean it up, clean it up. We’re a meditation centre.’ With fellow judges I retreat to the Paradiso, where the sturm und drang subsides under the influence of legally circulating marijuana. Colin MacInnes is with us, spiky silver hair thrusting from a black gaberdine cloak, covering the festival for New Society. ‘So it finally took a Nazi to shake you hippie sophisticates,’ he says, grinning. Jean Shrimpton is deathly quiet, her famous face craving anonymity. SUCK gives the shadows genitals. SUCK destroys sexual jealousy with group sex. I remind the ‘Shrimp’ of something more terrifying than the onstage antics of Otto Muehl – the reaction of the Australian media to the mini-skirt she wore at the 1965 Melbourne Cup. Porn flickers from giant screens as we drift determinedly to an anteroom, where Mick Jagger is prancing on the monitor, a replay of the Brian Jones memorial concert at Hyde Park. Hey, you, get offa my cloud . . .

  ‘I saved the goose,’ remarks Heathcote, his eyes still watery, ‘because planetary torture has enough PR men.’

  The End-Of-An-Era Oz struck home. Letters flooded the office, the phones rang hot with weepy gratitude. On the BBC, talking heads chewed over the contents of the editor’s diatribe, headlined by Jim Anderson as ‘All God’s Flower Children Got de Clap’. The world’s Underground press reprinted the piece with ringing endorsements. Offence was taken in some quarters. ‘I couldn’t believe what you said about Rolling Stone,’ wrote Jann Wenner, defending his cuddly-feely office ambience. ‘To call it “icy” is absurd – bad writing and reporting.’ But he endorsed its general tenor – ‘The Weathermen, Jerry Rubin etc are all complete bullshit as I have been saying for years now.’

  I had taken a mild dig at Abbie Hoffman, and he sent an impassioned three-page reply: ‘If people relate to me as a public image, I do act aloof. What else should I do, spend my life signing autographs? If I refuse to be in some revolutionary dilettante’s movie, I’m aloof; if I agree, I’m a media freak.’ Fame in a revolutionary context was troublesome. ‘Should or should I not sell the movie rights of Revolution for the Hell of It to MGM? They are pigs, but will get out a message to millions. Do I have the right to throw away tons of bread when brothers and sisters are facing jail? I am one of those brothers and sisters too.’ For Abbie to stay on the street required a ‘ton of bread’. The Chicago trial would cost a million dollars. ‘Becoming popular was part and parcel of our defence. That was only one of my trials.’

  In the end, Abbie sold the movie rights for 65,000. He revealed the breakdown: the Law Commune received 6,500; the Black Panthers, 25,000; the Conspiracy Trial, 10,000; Yippie administration, 5,000. The rest went in taxes, with Abbie keeping under 2,000. ‘No Underground paper printed that story.’

  The movie was never made. ‘You pick up the dollar to destroy the dollar. Mao would understand, teenyboppers won’t.’ Abbie was tired of ten years of street struggle – arrests, beatings, jail terms and ‘people who call you in the dead of night to do a benefit in New Jersey and accuse you of élitism, racism and male chauvinism if you refuse. The movement has a built-in hatred of success, of becoming popular’ – people were outraged that he and Jerry weren’t dead or in jail.

  ‘I don’t say Oz is in that bag. Oz tries to blend art and politics in a new way. It clearly is not afraid to fuck around and struggle not only with its élitism, racism, chauvinism and all the other isms that we are supposed to do battle with as we rise up each morning, but it does what few movement groups do – it struggles with its own genius. A noble struggle indeed . . .’

  One day he hoped to get to England, though after Jerry Rubin’s expulsion, and his own deportation from Canada, he feared his feet would never touch British soil. Moved by his candour, I hoped that one day they would. ‘If all god’s children got the clap,’ wrote an Oz reader from Esher, ‘maybe they ought to stop balling.’

  Another reader was desperate to form ‘an alternative scene to the straight gays’, a minority within a minority, one designed to ‘overcome plasticity and overall uncoolness’.

  Charles Shaar Murray heralded Bob Dylan’s new album, New Morning, as ‘a breath of clean air in a darkly polluted musical environment – welcome back’.

  Sheila Rowbotham reviewed The Female Eunuch, observing that ‘in the midst of the defiance and irony there’s a gawky, forlorn girl, miserably dragging sanitary towels about in her school satchel, moving into unhappy adolescence, not liking her mother, self-conscious about being tall and dreaming of crushing her nose into a giant’s tweed suit’. Germaine risked isolation and the impotence of being a ‘scarecrow radical – they frighten the sparrows a bit at first . . . and can look impudent . . . but they can’t do anything’. And to Do It was what everyone wanted To Do.

  Soon after the Frost take-over, I received an anonymous phone call. ‘Our theatre group is planning an action at Miss World,’ a woman said. ‘Where do you get hold of smoke bombs?’ I gave her Mick Farren’s phone number. With a heightened sense of curiosity, Louise and I settled down to watch the telecast of the 1970 Miss World Pageant, broadcast live from the Albert Hall. It rolled along predictably, with Bob Hope’s gags scripted to the last leer. Suddenly, a puff of pink smoke; the sound of whistles, rattles and shrieks. Women in jeans waving leaflets surged to the stage, explosions, flour bombs, distress flares . . . it was thrilling. Bob Hope ran from the scene. Louise and I laughed.

  The ‘spectacle’ had been thwarted. Bob Hope lurched back to the mike. ‘Anybody who wants to interrupt something as beautiful as this must be on some kind of dope.’ Not this time – for once. ‘The perpetrators will pay for this. Upstairs will see to that.’ As the feminist guerrillas fled the scene, they shouted, ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry.’

  A mood that was to envelop us all.

  Towards the end of 1970, the pace quickened, with January Oz underway and the Ink juggernaut gathering steam. Ed, Andrew, Felix and myself held ‘strategy meetings’, diaries on laps, phones off the hook, frowns on our faces. Andrew and Ed dealt with budgets and corporate formalities, while Felix claimed to be doing deep research into the potential adbase. Every so often I dashed off letters to prominent bylines, urging them to ‘think Ink’. Ed drew up lists of celebrities and wealthy sympathisers, who were targeted for funds. In the evenings, his maroon Morgan collected me at the basement and whisked me off to the elegant dwellings of famous playwrights and novelists, where I would rave about the triumph of the Underground media – the latest Oz had sold over 50,000 – and liken an investment in Ink to Castro’s swoop down from the Sierra Maestra. Soon to switch from a desk at Cape to the uncertain future of Ink, Ed’s predicament lent a sense of urgency to the acquisition of capital. He was to be paid in excess of everyone else, in recognition of the ‘lifestyle gap’. The Morgan was a fussy beast. He was also in the middle of a prolonged breakup with his wife, Michelene, and there were financial obligations to his young sons. We accepted the logic of a salary differential. It was worth it for Ed’s money-raising skills and his classy media profile.

  Louise distanced herself from the new venture. She saw it
as futile and time-wasting. ‘A gravy train for male egos,’ she groaned, as yet another meeting swamped the basement. And she was wary of Ed Victor. ‘He left his wife so he can screw women around the clock. He fell for your playpower bullshit.’

  Louise remained loyal to Michelene. No amount of spoutings by Ed from editorials in Black Dwarf or from Mao’s Little Red Book could convince her that his commitment was to anything more than radical chic.

  Jim, too, refused to get Inked. For him, it was till death do us part at Oz. Since the success of Time Out, the adbase had sunk, and the entire Underground press was Inkwary. Should we combine with Frendz and IT, or compete fiercely? Meetings took place with hairier, grungier rivals, ideologies clashed, fears metastasised. Ink lumbered onwards regardless, an uncouth beast, intent on reaching a new market, the ‘vast minority’ which lay between the quality Sundays and the wilder shores of Ladbroke Grove.

  As a promotion for Ink, and to build support for the obscenity trial, I often addressed students on campus. At Balliol College in Oxford, a symposium on the Underground was organised by Tony ‘How It Was’ Palmer, now a columnist for the Spectator and the Observer. After my tub-thumping harangue, sympathetic students jostled the dais. One of these was Geoffrey Robertson, at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. ‘I’d be happy to help with your defence,’ he offered. Geoff looked about sixteen and was writing a thesis on the Philosophy of Free Speech.