Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  At noon the next day, Jim and Felix came to the basement and the three of us put on our costumes. Reporters were shown into the dark back room, glowing with Sharp’s pot-rally posters. ‘The police are abusing their powers,’ I said, ‘trying to wipe Oz out.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Felix, ‘fuck’n’ stormtroopers.’ I glared at him. To win the media war against the fuzz, I wanted us to appear reasonable and good humoured.

  ‘It’s okay to prosecute a single issue,’ I said, ‘but why vandalise our office?’

  Would there be another Oz before the trial? Yes – next month. ‘An Oz my grandmother would be proud to show her vicar.’ Central Criminal Court had issued a warning that the charges on the original Schoolkids Oz indictment (publishing an obscene magazine) were to be ‘substantially altered’. This might mean being hit with conspiracy, as with IT, and having a much harder fight on our hands. Or it meant that their next target was Cunt Power Oz, and every issue since. Who knows? The new Oz would be strategic PR; a sign to the public that the editors were prepared to play ball, until a verdict was reached at the Old Bailey. We called it Granny’s Oz.

  ‘So no more smut then?’ It was News of the World.

  ‘That’s your trip.’

  Then the photo opportunity – three editors clad in the arrow-patterned garb of Broadmoor convicts. Very convincing, apart from Felix’s snake-skin boots. The Daily Mail asked, ‘Where did you get the outfits?’

  ‘Smuggled out of Brixton.’

  A crime reporter from one of the tabloids told me that Luff had been seen at the West London Magistrate’s Court on Saturday morning, an hour or so before he had come to collect me at Notting Hill Police Station. I looked puzzled, and he laughed. ‘Setting things up with the beak, I should think.’

  The next day, there were light-hearted headlines about Granny’s Oz and quotes from our claims of ‘relentless police harassment’. A week later Louise and I appeared again before Stephenson, where the matter was adjourned. This time, neither Luff nor the magistrate put up the slightest objection to bail.

  Soon afterwards, the Director of Public Prosecutions released a revised indictment against the editors of Schoolkids Oz. It confirmed our worst fears.

  16

  no ROOM at the INNS

  The West End première of Performance, the ‘hippie gangster’ movie starring Mick Jagger, was scheduled for January 1971 as a flashy benefit for Release. The Curzon lobby was sardined with groovers trying to look cool, while straining to catch sight of the star. In the fallout from his brushes with the Drugs Squad, Mick had sought advice from Release, and tonight’s appearance was his payback. Except Mick didn’t show. Some of the A-list donors wanted their money back. The extras from the extended family of gangland’s Kray Twins stood around cracking their knuckles.

  After the movie, the Rolling Stones press agent announced, ‘Mick invites you all to Tramps’. A surge to the street. ‘Eric-the Tramp’, a derelict with silver boots and a macramé head band, who had attached himself to Oz, loped beside me into the disco, a bedroll on his back. The black-tie manager barred the door. ‘Cool it,’ I said. ‘He’s your club mascot.’ In the baffled pause, a gangster face – one of the infamous Krays – loomed over my shoulder. ‘What’s the hold-up?’ Our party was ushered inside, where Eric checked in his swag. He hit the dance floor with Louise and his silver boots, but to no avail. The star’s no-show cast a pall on the night and Release didn’t make a cent.

  ‘The dress circle was packed with poseurs,’ wailed Caroline Coon. ‘They smoke pot after dinner, but couldn’t care less about changing the law. Most of them got in free.’

  At 2 a.m., still half expecting Mick to materialise at the bandstand, Caroline received a call from Paris. Mick was ‘fogged up’ in a suite at the George V Hotel, along with Bianca de Macias, his latest flame. Caroline was furious – and still so twenty-five years later. ‘I spent hours briefing his lawyers on bent cops, but Mick never coughed up a penny.’ Caroline said she sensed something in the air that night, a harbinger of meaner times . . .

  The flour-throwing feminists at the Albert Hall were shunted before a magistrate and charged with affray. The Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, took action against Rudi Dutschke. ‘Red’ Rudi had been shot in the head in 1968, after leading a student uprising in Berlin. Admitted to Britain for surgery, he was permitted by the Labour government to pursue post-graduate studies at Cambridge. When his visa came up for review, the Conservatives kicked him out. The National Council for Civil Liberties proclaimed that ‘the virus of political intolerance has arrived in Britain’.

  On 27 January, Louise and I again appeared at the West London Magistrates’ Court, where police tendered statements of their basement raid: I introduced myself to the woman whom I now know to be Louise Ferrier who was holding a cigarette between her fingers. I said, ‘There seems to be some little doubt that this is a cannabis reefer’. She looked at me and began to tremble. Neville said, ‘All the drugs here are mine.’ I then placed a tape-recorder on the table and Neville picked it up quickly and concealed it under his clothing. I took possession of it. I then produced a hookah. Neville said, ‘Me and my friends use that . . .’ I cautioned him. Neville said, ‘You are the most ignorant policeman I have ever met. You are all pigs.’

  Back in Sydney in 1963, Oz had satirised such police reports with relish, but our exaggerations were no match for the real-life version. The matter was adjourned.

  On the same day, Michael X, who faced a charge of demanding money with menaces, jumped bail and fled to Trinidad. A few days before, enticed by the suggestion of his wife Desiree that I buy their big brass bed, I happened to visit the beleaguered activist at home. Michael’s standing among radicals had plummeted, thanks to shabby infighting within the West Indian community and his knife-happy ways. For me, ever the naif, he was always a man of charm. The sum involved in the extortion charge was three pounds.

  ‘Jurors are victims of lifelong, racist indoctrination,’ he told me. ‘To them I am the nasty nigger of their nightmares.’ Police threatened further charges: ‘They reckon I’m selling guns to my brothers.’

  I tested the bed. It was too rattly for the basement.

  Caroline Coon turned up at Release to find the door knocked down, the furniture burnt, phones ripped out and the files stolen. A message was scrawled on the wall, ‘Give Release to the people’. At least fifteen ‘people’ were in court that morning, expecting Release to help. A solicitor offered the Release team a basement as emergency headquarters. Meanwhile, the invaders wanted Caroline Coon to face ‘the people’.

  At a meeting in Princedale Road, I was hauled in to mediate. Despite her fabulous Forties filmstar look from the Chelsea Antique Market, Caroline stood alone, blue-eyeshadowed and grim; an exotic outcast. Having fled home at sixteen, she never discussed her family background.

  Mick Farren, on behalf of the White Panthers, accused her of ‘poncing around King’s Road while the kids are being busted in the streets’.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Caroline,’ I said, ‘most of you would be in jail.’

  Mick said Release was politically flabby: ‘Why don’t you bomb the police stations?’

  ‘You can bomb them if you want,’ said Caroline. ‘My work’s in the courts.’

  A deal was hammered out. Caroline agreed that Release could be ‘given to the people’, if the files were brought back. ‘See Caroline, that’s the way it works,’ commented Farren, ‘continuous revolution.’ His hands shook as he spoke, the legacy of a teenage splurge with amphetamines. I stood in the doorway, an arm around Caroline’s waist, as Mick muttered to his mates, ‘She doesn’t even smoke pot’.

  The files materialised the following day, unlike the street people, who were supposed to handle the bust calls. Release staffers drifted back from the bunker and Caroline turned her attention to coping with the debts. But something in Notting Hill had gone for ever.

  ‘We’re getting closer,’ warned the Angry Brigade, the UK version of t
he Weathermen, after two massive explosions outside the home of Robert Carr, the Minister of Employment. Closer to what? To Biba’s super-boutique, as it turned out, the target of a later attack. ‘The only thing you can do with modern slave houses,’ claimed the brigade’s communiqué, ‘is to wreck them.’ While the explosions were calculatedly bloodless, the repercussions were nasty, with the police ordered to kick out the jams. As a bomb-squadder remarked, during a warrantless swoop on the friend of a friend of a suspect: ‘These days, we don’t have time for legal niceties.’ More anti-Miss Worlders were rounded up. Police connected the ‘anger’ of the Angry Brigade with the catchcry of Bob Hope’s harpies – neither ugly nor beautiful, but ‘angry’.

  At Oz, too, anger was paramount, draining the pages of colour. Set in a Victorian oval frame on the cover, our token granny was photographed defiantly tokin’ on a joint and wearing a Lee Heater badge. In large Olde English typeface below her was the text of the updated indictment: That Oz Publications conspired together with Vivian Berger and certain other young persons to produce a magazine containing divers obscene lewd sexually perverted articles, cartoons, drawings and illustrations with intent thereby to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and young persons within the Realm and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires.

  Not only a conspiracy, but an intention to corrupt and debauch – our thoughts were now on trial.

  And so was one of the schoolkids, by default. To strengthen the conspiracy charge, the Crown needed to produce a live ‘accomplice’, a young person actually involved in putting together the magazine. Who better than Vivian? After all, he was the perpetrator of Rupert Bear, was he not, and surely the schoolkid most corrupted by the Oz editors? (The cuddly ikon had been depicted with a mighty donger, hurling himself at the cavernous vagina of ‘Gypsy Granny’, a character created by Robert Crumb.) Little did they know that Vivian’s family background was libertarian and he and his mother were raring to ‘stick it to the pigs’.

  Jagger pouted from the back cover of Granny’s Oz in an ad for Performance. Inside, next to a topless Anita Pallenberg, he lay pantless on a mattress, his salami and sugar melon set on display. To get the full effect, however, you needed a magnifying glass. Under pressure from Jim Haynes and the film-makers, who were spitting chips over the celluloid heist, we had shied away from publishing the full-page enlargement that Jim Anderson had hoped to get away with. ‘Ripping off frames of Mick Jagger’s genitals,’ fumed Mike Zwerin in the Village Voice, ‘is not what I call revolutionary.’ After a craven letter of apology to all concerned, Oz was forgiven, and the stamp-sized pin-up flashed around the world.

  The Oz Obscenity Fund was launched with an ad. HELP OZ WIN AT THE OLD BAILEY, urged the headline above a Ron Cobb cartoon of three wizened hippies on a twenty-first-century park bench – AND GROW OLD GRACEFULLY.

  Felix, Jim and myself met regularly with Tom Williams QC, who had accepted the brief to lead the defence. David Offenbach assured us that Williams was the man for the job, despite his being a Baptist lay preacher.

  ‘Sure this is not because he is a Labour MP, David?’ I asked mischievously. I knew that David fancied himself as a future Labour candidate.

  ‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘It’s good to work against type. The jury will be impressed.’

  So we sat in Tom Williams’s dark-panelled office, recounting the events that had led to the appearance of Schoolkids Oz. Behind a desk topped with green leather, the QC took notes in a Dickensian journal, probably with a quill. Tea was served, which Williams actually slurped as he rubbergloved his way through the magazine. He kept muttering, ‘This is not my cup of tea . . . slurp . . . this is not my cup of tea . . . slurp.’ Dressing up as schoolkids, he warned, might be tolerated by a magistrate, but was bound to invoke a citation for contempt at the Old Bailey – perhaps even a charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Oh dear, dear. He wondered if it was even possible to find a credible expert to vouch for the merit of Oz.

  Win or lose, costs would be heavy, and we each filed applications for legal aid. Private Eye reported an aside of the Home Secretary, ‘I think it’s time we did a Dutschke on Neville’. In a thick, fur-lined Swedish navy coat, I trudged up and down Princedale Road trying to explain to reporters why the counter-culture was under siege. ‘There’s only an inch of difference between Labour and the Conservatives,’ I lamented to Rolling Stone, ‘but it’s the inch in which we live.’

  In February, shops displayed the paperback of Playpower. ‘I suppose you could call it a seminal book,’ sighed Thomas Wiseman in the Guardian, but ‘the self-mesmerising slogan shouting has already gone sour . . .’ To alert the ‘wide public’, he juxtaposed the high-pitched euphoria of the earlier hardcover with downbeat quotes from my End-of-an-Era article in Oz. ‘One gets a sort of psychedelically speeded up version of the tinsel god that failed . . . we are not really witnessing a change of heart so much as someone arguing with himself out loud.’ It was true. (Yawn. And I’m still arguing.) Wiseman was worried that an entire generation would get stuck in the playpen – no danger to society, he reasoned, but to ourselves – our talents, our brightness, our bodies. In reply, I noted that many of the ‘second thoughts’ had been revised into the text of the paperback. The real significance of the reassessment, I argued, was not that I had changed my mind, but that the Movement had changed its course.

  Didi Wadidi came to London to fuck Felix, Jim and myself and to rate our performances for Suck. Slim, cream-skinned, with swirling jet-black hair, Didi had starred in Soft Girls, a hard-core hash-table manual of hippie porn. As German editor of Suck, she had been one of the judges at the Wet Dream Festival in Amsterdam, where the two of us had exchanged smirks. When Didi knocked on our door, in the drizzle of a London twilight, Louise and I were unaware of her journo agenda.

  The young feminist was a powerhouse of political savvy and fervid for sex. She came, she saw, she copulated. ‘The three of us together, yes?’ suggested Didi, disrobing. It was a stage in our relationship of being open, up front, and I felt it could have gone either way, but Louise declined. ‘Change the sheets when you’ve finished,’ she called as she shot out the door. When it came to the realm of my sex games, my fantasies, Louise was reaching a point of ceasing to care.

  News of Didi’s assignment filtered to the Oz office. Felix, shaggy beard glistening with expectation, popped his head through my kitchen. Farewell, Didi, thanks, it was great . . . Suck’s deadline was imminent. Didi and Felix were out the door even quicker than Louise. And all too soon, Jim Anderson was going to be in for the night of his life.

  On Sunday night, 20 March 1971, I stood in the arrival lounge at Heathrow Airport, waiting to welcome Abbie Hoffman, flying in from Paris. After the headlines ignited by Jerry Rubin, it was uncertain whether Abbie would be let into Britain. Accompanying me was Geoff Robertson, the scrubbed-faced law graduate from Sydney who had offered his help during a meeting at Oxford. Geoff had since sat in on strategy sessions with David Offenbach, gently scolding him for the lack of preparation. On the phone, Abbie Hoffman had been thrilled when I boasted that I would ‘bring my lawyer’. In his bestseller Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson had popularised the role of the lawyer-in-waiting, and now they were all the rage. Still on bail, Abbie had twice been deported from Canada and was banned from public activities in twenty American states.

  The terminal was packed. With an ear-to-ear grin and a frizz of black hair, Abbie bounded out the door, clad in jeans and a green sweater. ‘I told them I wanted to overthrow the government,’ he said, ‘and that I’d need three days.’ His arms encircled Danae Brook, also part of the welcoming party. Abbie’s fingers sparkled with silvery rings.

  ‘What did immigration say?’

  ‘Oh, that it might take a little longer,’ he said, laughing. ‘They gave me a month.’

  Surely he was in their books as a yippie felon?

  ‘Nope. Officially, I’m a writ
er on my way to see my publisher.’

  And that was me. Oz was the only outlet for Abbie’s work in Britain, despite the success of his US paperbacks, Woodstock Nation and Revolution for the Hell of It.

  ‘Excuse me . . .’ A man in a grey suit and circular, steel-framed spectacles stood beside us. He said he was from the Home Office. ‘Sorry to trouble you, Mr Hoffman, could you please return to Immigration?’ The penny had dropped.

  Geoff Robertson stepped forward. ‘Mr Hoffman is legally on British soil, as I understand it, with his passport already stamped.’

  ‘Yeah, buddy,’ grinned Abbie, ‘you blew it . . .’

  Danae headed the car to West London, while Abbie stroked her lustrous hair. This was a private visit, he said, and he had no intention of trying to outdo Jerry Rubin. The yippie needed R & R before returning to organise the May Day antiwar demos in Washington. At my urging, he agreed to hold a press conference – ‘if it helps drum up support for Oz’.

  The next day, Danae delivered Abbie to the Oz office, where he was due to meet the press. What a rum lot. The only reason most of them came, I learned later, was that they had confused Hoffman with a high-profile wrestler of the same name.

  ‘I’m just back from top-level talks in Paris,’ said Abbie, ‘with the enemy.’ The yippies were in the process of setting up Radio Hanoi, to broadcast peace propaganda to US troops in South Vietnam.