Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Leary emphasized the importance of “set and setting” for psychedelic exploration—the idea that your mental state and physical surroundings would be the most significant predictor of the type of trip you’d experience. In other words, almost all bad trips could be avoided with the proper precautions and preparation. But according to Lyman’s friend Charles Giuliano, Mel purposely subverted these guidelines to work to his advantage. He’d dose a group of friends, then show them an alarming movie, or wait for people to enter the apex of their trip and then present both a problem and the solution, making Lyman a hero in their eyes. At some point Lyman’s girlfriend Judy became mentally unhinged, in part due to taking acid in a fragile state, and she fled back home to Kansas. “He worshipped Judy, really loved her,” Giuliano surmised. “Then she split. She couldn’t help it—she was totally freaked out.”

  Soon, Leary would help define a generation by coining the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and Richard Alpert would travel to India, transforming himself into Ram Dass, one of the most prominent spiritual leaders of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, a heartbroken Mel Lyman moved into Jim Kweskin’s attic in Huron Village, a neighborhood right outside Harvard Square.

  Kweskin and Lyman had problems with the growing folk music scene in New England. They formed a twenty-man committee called United Illuminating to address certain issues they felt were beginning to ruin the Newport Folk Festival. “There are 26 performing groups on this Saturday night. That means eight minutes for each performer,” Kweskin declared in the summer of 1966. “How can Chuck Berry or The Lovin’ Spoonful be expected to do anything in that amount of time?” Joan Baez, Lyman said, was invited to join the discussion but had refused to come. She darkly remarked that Lyman and Kweskin were bringing “hate” to everything they touched.

  “Every year, they build on the ruins of last year’s festival,” Lyman complained to a reporter. “There is an attitude here of fall in, do your gig and split.” In Lyman’s ideal world, the feeling that the Newport Folk Festival evoked, at its best, was something to aspire to as a way of life: community, music, and teamwork in service of the attempt to make something unique. Sometime during the summer of ’66, it must have become apparent to Lyman that instead of trying to fix a faltering fellowship like the Newport Folk Festival, he could just as easily build his own from scratch.

  Back in Boston, he took note of a set of crumbling houses in a crime-ridden part of Roxbury known as Fort Hill. Fort Ave. Terrace abutted a public park, formerly the grounds of a Revolutionary War fort. In the middle stood a seventy-foot Gothic tower right out of a fairy tale, albeit one that had gone very, very wrong. From afar, it looks as if the iconic Disney World castle has crumbled save for one remaining turret. The Cochituate Standpipe, built to provide water to the growing Roxbury neighborhood in 1868, had fallen out of use by 1880. Fifteen years later, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was commissioned to replicate the success of his work with New York’s Central Park and the connected string of green spaces in Boston known as the Emerald Necklace, and turn the fort into an eye-pleasing public space, incorporating the defunct structure. He added an iron balcony on the top, an attendant’s office on the ground. The Cochituate Standpipe would serve as an observatory with a stunning view of a growing city; it can be spotted from countless locations all over Boston.

  As the city grew, Roxbury fell into decline. In the fall of 1966, Lyman, his wife, and a few friends moved into some run-down houses on Fort Ave. Terrace and began slowly renovating them. His new Family was about to move in.

  * * *

  • • •

  AT ONE POINT the Lyman Family owned every house on Fort Ave. Terrace and even a couple on Fort Avenue, forming an L-shaped territory hugging the southwest corner of Highland Park. Though the Cochituate Standpipe belonged to the city of Boston, the Lymans cut the lock off the tower, replaced it with their own, and began to fix up the spooky-looking relic as well as the weedy, broken-glass-covered park that surrounded it.

  Throughout 1967 and 1968, Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Community were treated as a curiosity in the press, with reporters and TV producers trudging up the hill to capture a human interest piece in step with the times. But after Charles Manson and his family went on their killing spree in Los Angeles in 1969, the public regarded the idea of communal living under the direction of a charismatic leader with greater alarm. David Felton, the editor of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had covered the Manson story for Rolling Stone, and in 1971 went to Boston to investigate the Lymans for the magazine. His story spanned two back-to-back issues and landed Mel Lyman on the cover. The article identifies many Family members by full name, investigates Lyman’s media company, United Illuminating, Inc.,* and interviews devotees and defectors. It’s filled with larger-than-life details and startling quotes, such as this one from Jim Kweskin, the man who, five years earlier, was famous for making music with kazoos and washboards: “The Manson Family preached peace and love and went around killing people. We don’t preach peace and love and we haven’t killed anyone. Yet.”

  In the spring of 1968, Lyman had a dream whose imagery he felt was prescriptive. The next day he ordered his followers to construct a formidable, protective wall around his house. Like Van Morrison across the river, Lyman was now commanding people based on what he saw when he was sleeping.

  Now, driving down Fort Ave. Terrace, the wall was the only thing I could focus on. As I got close to the door they built into the wall, I noticed a green mailbox affixed to the structure. On a piece of paper taped to the mailbox was a list of the current residents of the house: Jim Kweskin, United Illuminating, and half a dozen other names associated with the Lyman Family. I looked up in shock at the house behind the wall and saw the silhouettes of some people through the main bay window. Mel Lyman has been gone since 1978, but in that moment I realized that his Family was alive and well, and were still living together up on Fort Hill.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE LYMAN FAMILY attracted followers of a pedigree far more impressive than that of your run-of-the-mill sixties commune. During its ascent, the Fort Hill Community attracted the likes of Jessie Benton, daughter of the painter Thomas Hart Benton; Mark Frechette, troubled star of the film Zabriskie Point; Paul Williams, founder of the groundbreaking music magazine Crawdaddy; two children of the novelist Kay Boyle; David Gude, a musical influence on James Taylor and Carly Simon back on Martha’s Vineyard; and Owen deLong, a Harvard graduate who had been a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy. David Felton was curious why they would hand over their freedom so casually in exchange for what he considered to be neofascism. “It did raise questions for me that they were all from liberal, artistic, creative families,” Felton says. “It crossed my mind: did these kind of people make bad parents?”

  What was daily life on Fort Hill like in the late sixties and early seventies? A current resident might describe a happy community, where hard work paid off and people revealed their unconscious intentions through continued personal confrontations. But even those members would agree that there could be extreme tactics of control. “He does manipulate us, but he doesn’t manipulate us for evil,” Lyman’s third wife, Jessie Benton, once admitted. “He manipulates us to be what we truly are.”

  A former member of the Lyman Family, however, might have a darker take. One ex-member, Norman Truss, told Felton, “The only rules were the ones Mel made up as he went along, and he changed them from day to day.” These involved everything from when one should sleep and shower, who could be romantically involved with each other, and even whether sexual intercourse was currently allowed. According to some FHC exiles, members who needed help following these rules could be mercilessly ridiculed, placed inside a windowless basement (known as the Vault), or given a guided LSD trip by Mel himself to help adjust to the Hill’s way of life. A deep interest in astrology was a requisite, and serious decisions were often made based on a singular r
eading. If it helped them control somebody, one former member reported, these readings would be rigged. They all loved Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, playing basketball, and watching televised football games. Occasionally, they’d record music too.

  Felton’s article “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America” opens with the escape of Paul Williams, the founder of Crawdaddy. But it was long after the story was published that Felton learned exactly why he fled the Hill. According to Felton, Williams had a private session with Mel—an acid session. “And during the time, Paul told him that he was in love with him,” Felton says. “The next night, Mel, who had tape-recorded the whole session, played it publicly for the whole house at the dinner table, and turned him into a vegetable, basically. Now, that is a pretty cruel mind-fuck.”

  The piece also dives into the rise and fall of Avatar, a popular underground newspaper, which was the subject of multiple controversies in 1968. “Lyman got on this trip of wanting to take over the world through media,” Felton explains. Inspired by the early success of the Los Angeles Free Press and the sudden availability of cheap offset printing, new branches of the underground press were sprouting up weekly all over the United States in the mid-sixties. Antiwar screeds, counterculture poetry, and deliberate tests of the limits of free speech were all typical of the type of content plastered all over the abundant page counts found in these underground tabloids; the Lyman Family wanted to join the party. Or as Mel put it, “Once the basic requirements of survival had been met we were able to devote some time to other things . . . we had something good and something can only stay good if it is shared.”

  There was only one problem. They didn’t know how to print and distribute a newspaper.

  Luckily for them, Dave Wilson, the founder of Broadside of Boston, had grown tired of covering the increasingly quiet Cambridge folk scene and wanted to turn his publishing talents toward something more political. Just like Kweskin before him, the Boston/Cambridge folk scene had somehow drawn a dotted line directly from guitar ballads to communes, from tradition to counterculture. In July 1967, after much insisting from the residents of Fort Hill, everyone agreed on the newspaper’s name: Avatar. Derived from a Sanskrit word, an avatar is a deity who takes on a human form to walk the Earth; a bold title for a newspaper, certainly.

  Looking at old issues is a pure dose of sixties madness. Across several editions from 1968, there are fetishistic photo spreads of the Cochituate Standpipe tower, the Family’s most visible symbol of their growing power, and columns with titles like “Diary of a Young Artist” and “Journals of John the Wasted.” Astrological discussions share the page with diatribes against the war in Vietnam. Each issue is tied together with mystical, elegant drawings by Lyman Family artist Eben Given, and the presentation on the whole is impressively cool and enigmatic. It’s easy to see why the paper was a hit with the student population. At its peak, Avatar was published biweekly, running anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four pages and packed with ads.

  Most striking is the amount of real estate dedicated to photos of Mel, collages of photos of Mel, quotes by Mel placed on top of even larger photographs of Mel. There’s a “letters to the editor” section in the front of each issue—but it’s dwarfed by the “Letters to Mel” section in the back. On page 11 of December 1967’s “Woman Issue” is a half-page drawing of an open mouth with one of Mel’s poems placed inside.

  I am going to fuck the world

  I am going to fill it with hot sperm

  Mmm mmm, I can’t wait

  I am a giant erection

  I am ALL COCK

  . . . and the world

  is ALL CUNT

  This, again, is from “The Woman Issue,” in which the Lyman Family women are finally allowed to represent themselves with their own words. Elsewhere, Jessie Benton declares, “To live for Man is the highest expectation.”

  Responding to a letter writer with a hopeless outlook on life, Mel Lyman replies, “Why don’t you just try and let yourself DIE and see what happens.” Such aggression wouldn’t be out of place in a YouTube comment, and indeed some of Avatar’s features predict the current social media landscape. All-caps, troll-style replies to genuine calls for help? You can see that both on Twitter and in Avatar. Hundreds of photos of yourself all collected in one place? That’s on Facebook right now and in the March 29, 1968, issue of the paper. (And of course, on most social platforms, your profile picture is referred to as your “avatar.”) Seen today, Avatar sometimes resembles a printed-out collection of Internet memes and rants, published words that garnered Lyman literal “followers.” But it’s also a reminder of how difficult it once was to find an audience for provocative self-expression. For those with a vested interest in keeping things civil, the language and philosophy printed in Avatar were truly upsetting. When issue 11 came off the presses in October 1967, Family members who sold it on the streets of Boston began getting arrested on obscenity charges.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT STARTED IN CAMBRIDGE. Throughout the first ten months of 1967, Mayor Daniel J. Hayes Jr. had grown increasingly fed up with a scourge that was spreading along the banks of the Charles River and, alarmingly, into the main streets of his great city. The problem? Hippies. “The great unwashed are creating an intolerable situation in our City by the widespread use of drugs and other anti-social practices such as boys and girls living together under the guise of ‘Free Love’ and without any benefit of clergy,” Hayes declared. Two days after his announcement of a “War on Hippies,” there was a televised police raid of 183 Columbia Street, a house in a slum of Cambridge, yielding narcotics arrests for the seventeen people inside. “I never saw such a filthy situation. There are terms which I could use but I would not use in public,” the mayor told reporters, proud of his self-censorship.

  Hayes was up for reelection in less than a month, and the purge was a way of grabbing headlines. One bizarre profile in The Harvard Crimson featured Hayes gleefully sipping a chocolate shake, smoking Newports, and expounding on his hot new term for hippies. “It’s not the hippie, it’s the hip-bo.” Come again? “Hip-bo comes from three things. First, hobo. Second, the combination of hippie and bum. Third, from Life Buoy soap. Remember that commercial with the foghorn blowing B-O, B-O?” The term did not catch on.

  Hayes had no idea that Lyman, the mastermind behind Avatar, hated the very concept of “the hippie” just as he did, but it wouldn’t have mattered: He knew filth when he saw it. At first, Hayes figured he could shut the underground rag down on a technicality. “The editors were warned that their offices would be condemned unless they installed ‘separate bathrooms for men and women,’” Boston Magazine reported. “Rather than bow to what they felt was patent harassment, the paper moved itself to 37 Rutland Street in Boston’s South End.”

  The next issue of Avatar featured a mock obituary of Mayor Hayes.

  At the mayor’s behest, an anonymous city council member spread word to three of Cambridge’s biggest newspaper stands that continued sales of Avatar would result in prosecution; all capitulated. Mel Lyman retaliated by sending hordes of Hill people into Harvard Square to hawk the newspaper the old-fashioned way. Extra! Extra! God is a harmonica player with a commune in Roxbury and this is his cool underground newspaper!

  Next came a strategy of minutiae. Hayes declared the sellers needed permits. Avatar obtained one. Cambridge then told Avatar they had to renew it every month. City Manager Joseph A. DeGuglielmo then revoked the permit anyway, citing “obscene literature,” and denied their request for a new permit. It was all but an official ban on the sale of Avatar achieved through an endless roll of red tape, the latest episode in the city’s rich tradition of censorship. The phrase “Banned in Boston” was coined in the 1890s in response to moral crusader Anthony Comstock’s fiery speeches on obscene and lewd creations; his followers in turn founded the New England Watch and Ward Society, a censorship advocacy group. Under the
society’s influence, banning books became commonplace; the Boston Public Library relocated its sinful titles to a locked room that became known as the Inferno. Distasteful plays were edited in advance of local performances; these censored cutups became known as the “Boston Version.” In fact, this mind-set was so embedded into the fabric of the city, Boston still had an official city censor until 1982; the last man to hold the job, the aptly named Richard Sinnott, spent most of the sixties and seventies trying to police the content of rock concerts and the musical Hair. The reasons why Boston became Censorship Central are complex, but its Puritan heritage, reinforced by subsequent generations of conservative Catholic citizens, partly explains it. Over the years, city censors banned everything from Leaves of Grass to “Wake Up Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers.