Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Lyman was livid, but also instantly knew what many book publishers had gleaned during the peak of Boston’s banning efforts: A certain audience would see this as the paper’s strongest selling point. For the next issue, Lyman had Eben Given design a lush, hand-drawn center spread, featuring four words that spelled it out pretty clearly:

  FUCK

  SHIT

  PISS

  CUNT

  “I’ll rent a goddamn airplane and drop them all over the goddamn motherfucking state,” Lyman wrote in the next issue. “This is just a polite warning, you’re playing with dynamite, don’t fuck with me.” The following week, someone started throwing bricks through the windows of establishments that sold or helped publish Avatar. Police raided the new offices, confiscating issues 11, 12, and 13. The War on Hippies was looking more and more like a direct attack on free speech. In response, thirty Avatar vendors were deployed to Harvard Square to hand out two thousand free issues to passersby. By the time vendor John Rogers and staff artist Ed Beardsley were arrested, the Avatar crew decided it was finally time to get a lawyer.

  “I was a typical Boston College grad. I thought booze was great and grass was bad,” attorney Joe Oteri told his alma mater’s newspaper in 1967. “It’s taken time to build up empathy for these people.” His clientele gave him the reputation as the city’s preeminent “pot lawyer.” An Italian-American native of South Boston, he was also a close family friend of future organized crime boss Whitey Bulger, and, eventually, host of The Joe Oteri Show on local TV.

  In court, before Judge Elijah Adlow, Oteri claimed that Beardsley’s possession of thousands of copies of the newspaper did not prove he intended to distribute it. The Crimson captured the dynamic that was developing in the courtroom:

  “You’re falling back on a technicality,” admonished Adlow. “This is first and foremost a question of morality.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” said Oteri. “And I thought this was a court of law.”

  The Joe Oteri Show, indeed.

  Avatar was well represented in the courtroom, though Lyman and Kweskin were nowhere to be found, and the paper’s coverage of the trial wavered from straight-up journalism to crass reactionary parody. In the next issue they facetiously quoted Judge Adlow as stating, “Shut up you c— and let’s get this f— show on the road.” When Adlow was made aware he was quoted as such, the judge responded, “The reporter for the paper needs a hearing aid, I use those words only in select conversations.”

  Among Oteri’s witnesses for the defense was a forty-five-year-old professor of government from Boston University named Howard Zinn. Zinn is now revered as the author of A People’s History of the United States and a lifelong defender of civil rights, but his presence at the trial did not cause any particular stir. In fact, he was treated as if he were part of the problem. Zinn testified that “a remarkably large proportion of the material [in Avatar] has had to do with issues of social importance.” Avatar reported that the prosecution attorney, Mr. Day, then proceeded to attack Zinn himself as someone “without redeeming social value.” Zinn’s outspoken protest of the draft and the Vietnam War would soon make some Bostonians feel the same way about the BU professor.

  In his closing argument, Oteri told Judge Adlow he would take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

  “Who’s getting excited about the Supreme Court?” Adlow replied. “When they look at this, they’re going to crawl out of their black pajamas and censor it.”

  Beardsley and Rogers were found guilty.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT FALL, the chocolate-shake-drinking Daniel J. Hayes Jr. lost the Cambridge mayoral election to Walter J. Sullivan. Suddenly, everyone was willing to compromise. In February 1968, the two parties agreed that there would be no more arrests of Avatar salesmen, no more confiscation, and, likewise, that Avatar would never have more than seven vendors in Harvard Square nor “aggressively sell” an issue to anyone, especially if they were under eighteen. Hayes and City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci claimed that the War on Hippies had nothing to do with their reelection campaigns.

  Avatar’s legal team, however, knew that wasn’t the case, and felt confident appealing the guilty sentences in a higher court to prove it. Harvey Silverglate, first under the employment of Joe Oteri and then on his own, pursued justice for Avatar and the Fort Hill Community even after the paper stopped being published later that year. “I knew certain things that suggested we would win,” Silverglate explained. “I knew police officers had sent their children to buy Avatars simply so they could charge vendors with distributing obscenity to minors. I knew the police had met with politicians to plan the harassment of Avatar vendors. I even knew of one instance where a judge involved with the case had met police officers to discuss the matter. Very illegal. And we were prepared to subpoena everyone involved. The Supreme Judicial Court knew we knew all of this, and the guilty verdicts were reversed.”

  The highest legal opinion on the matter is The Commonwealth v. Faith Gude, a decision which has served as a precedent for numerous free speech cases tried in the intervening years. The court statement reads, “[Avatar’s] authors seem to take pride in the rediscovery of certain four letter words old in Chaucer’s day and widely but covertly employed until recently. We cannot say that their use violates the statute. Any lapse was not one of morals but rather one of manners.”

  “Things have never been better for Avatar,” Lyman commented on the entire ordeal in 1968. “Look at all the free publicity we’re getting.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I THOUGHT MY RESEARCH into Fort Hill, Avatar, and Mel Lyman had been proceeding under the radar, but shortly after requesting some information about the Cochituate Standpipe from the Roxbury Historical Society, I was contacted by a member of the Lyman Family. Over e-mail, Dick Russell, who identified himself as a writer and a part-time Fort Hill resident, suggested we meet up. I was about to be vetted by the Fort Hill Community.

  Russell functions as the historian of the Fort Hill Community. His writing career includes coauthoring some of ex–Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura’s conspiracy-theory books and championing environmental causes. Though he isn’t mentioned in Felton’s 1971 exposé, that feature did have a hand in how he became a member: As a young journalist at the University of Kansas, he read the Rolling Stone piece, and was unsettled by the fact that the Family had purchased a farm nearby.

  Over coffee and sandwiches, Russell explains how the Fort Hill crew came west: In the late sixties, Lyman was getting tired of traveling long distances from city to city to check on the various new outposts of his community. His solution was as bizarre as you might imagine. One former Family member recalled that Mel consulted a map of the United States, drew lines between Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York—the cities where the FHC had outposts—and “decided to find land where the lines crossed, very near the geographical center of the forty-eight contiguous states, in northeastern Kansas.”

  Russell first visited the Kansas farm in the hopes of writing an exposé on the Family himself; he didn’t like the idea of the type of people described in Felton’s article setting up camp in his home state. “I still haven’t written the article,” Russell tells me as he smiles. “I fell in love with everyone there. All of those nasty tactics described in the article? I never saw any of it.” Russell contends that Mel Lyman didn’t feel he had accomplished all that he had set out to do, and by the time of his death he was “very, very despondent about it.”

  We talk about some of the negative angles to the Fort Hill story, as well as the importance of Avatar’s free speech victory. “I liked ‘the cut of your jib’ as the old pirate expression goes, and I think others would, too,” Russell e-mails me later. He goes on to explain that some of the community is interested in talking about the legacy of the Family, but others just want to quietly live out their golden years. He passes
along some contact information for a few community members possibly willing to talk. Meanwhile, I made plans to see Jim Kweskin perform live at Club Passim in Harvard Square.

  David Felton says that after his piece appeared, Kweskin and some others visited the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco and demanded to see cofounder and editor Jann Wenner. “Jann snuck out the back door. They were really upset about the story. I said we were going to call the police. They broke open the doors and came after me. Kweskin was yelling, ‘You pissant!’ Now sometimes they did beat people up, but mainly they just tried to make you scared. And if you weren’t scared they just left you alone. So finally, they just left us alone.”

  In 1972 or so, Felton was covering a Maria Muldaur concert; Kweskin happened to be the opener. Felton said hello, sparking a heated exchange. The journalist continued smiling until Kweskin smacked him across the face, drawing blood. “That’ll be good for your story,” the musician said. As he walked away, he told Felton, “If you ever say ‘hi’ to me again, I’ll kill you.” According to Felton, it was the last time the two men have spoken to each other. Jim Kweskin, however, claims he never saw Felton again after the Rolling Stone piece was published.

  * * *

  • • •

  JIM KWESKIN PULLS UP to Club Passim in a black Ford Econoline van with an extended cab. He’s the only one in the van. He brings some guitars into the club. When he comes back out, I greet him. He invites me into the van.

  We do a slow drive around Harvard Square, waiting for the clock to strike six so he can get cheaper parking for the van in a nearby lot. We double-park on Church Street and he pulls out his phone to show me videos of his recent tour of Japan. Kweskin is vice president of the Fort Hill Construction Company—a family-run contracting business headquartered in Los Angeles since 1971—and he often makes a point in interviews to state how he enjoys Jug Band reunion tours now that it isn’t his full-time job.

  Club Passim is where Club 47 existed for a chunk of the sixties; it’s a room that holds a lot of memories for Jim Kweskin. Inside, he muses on the dissolution of his original band in 1968. “There was a TV show on Channel 2 in Boston, and Mel did an interview on it,” Kweskin says. “The TV show was just Mel and [host] David Silver. It was so moving. So powerful and beautiful. Mel was so strong. Then a few weeks later the Jug Band was on a nationally broadcasted variety show. It was hosted by Jonathan Winters. He would do his comedy and then he’d bring musical artists out. They had us in costume, it was all staged. And I watched this thing a few weeks later and it just seemed so silly to me. I was looking at myself thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Here Mel Lyman could go on a little local TV show and be so beautiful and meaningful by talking, and then there’s the Jug Band on TV looking so silly.”

  That was the last straw for Kweskin. He told his bandmates that he couldn’t do it anymore. For many in the Cambridge folk scene, the 1968 breakup of Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band was the death knell for a community already in long decline. But Kweskin didn’t care. He had work to do. “We were building and fixing up houses,” Kweskin recalls of his daily life after the Jug Band. “I was the best Avatar salesman among the bunch. The first time I went out I sold thirty-five papers. Basically, I was living the life of the Fort Hill Family.”

  It’s puzzling to get inside the mind-set of someone who shared a bill with the Doors just twelve months earlier, now happily selling newspapers around Harvard Square, but Kweskin is genuinely happy recollecting the life change. He’s so open and friendly that it’s hard to reconcile him with the short-tempered Lyman acolyte from the late sixties and seventies.

  What was Mel Lyman’s message? Kweskin makes an attempt to answer but gets flustered.

  “Mel was very anti–peace and love of the hippie flower child. To him, life was hard work. We could all do it together, but it wasn’t playing around. It wasn’t just smoking pot. It was serious business. That’s one of the messages. There were many messages that went very deep into spiritualness. God was a personal thing that’s internalized, not organized religion. There were so many different levels of Mel’s message. I feel others are more qualified, I should be, I suppose, but . . .” The sentence trails off into a hearty laugh.

  Listening to him warm up for the show, I think how odd it is that jug music, which he declared ridiculous and unrewarding in 1968, is something he travels around the world doing blissfully today. I sit at a table up front with a couple who seem to be friends of Jim’s. I say hello and they introduce themselves. Their last name is Lyman.

  Just as my head starts to spin, the band begins playing the goofiest feel-good music I’ve ever heard. The whole show is so sweetly upbeat that it sometimes borders on parody, like an outtake from Christopher Guest’s film A Mighty Wind. At one point, Maria Muldaur takes out a balloon filled with helium and uses it to make Geoff Muldaur’s voice sound like a small child’s. Jim Kweskin is hard to read onstage. He doesn’t particularly look like he’s having fun, but then again, he doesn’t even need to play these gigs—on some level he must want to be here.

  Near the end of the show, Maria Muldaur—who admonished Kweskin and Lyman for being on a bad trip back in 1968—croons a song entitled “He Calls That Religion.” It’s a takedown of a hypocritical religious leader that starts out amusing and winds up serious. It’s hard to look into Kweskin’s blank stare and listen to Muldaur’s intense delivery and not draw a few conclusions.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted the Thomas Hart Benton exhibit “American Epics.” It was the first major reevaluation of the paintings by the so-called enemy of modernism since the 1980s. After seeing Benton’s large-scale work in person, I became fascinated by a particular piece, The Sources of Country Music, in which some of his son-in-law’s followers—all members of the Fort Hill Community—stood in as the models. Examining a reproduction of the mural, I took a hard look at the painting’s dancing couple at an outdoor hootenanny. Is that Jim Kweskin?

  Benton came out of retirement to paint the piece for the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1973, at age eighty-four. The previous year, Life magazine reported:

  He is also resigned to the fact that he has had little influence on contemporary American painting. What does still intrigue him is the whimsy of youth—in particular his 33-year-old daughter, Jessie, who married a controversial figure in the youth culture named Mel Lyman. Lyman, 34, is the spiritual leader of a network of communes in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Benton has given the group some property in Martha’s Vineyard and recently bought them a 281-acre farm in Kansas to grow their own food.

  “They’ve got some crazy ideas,” Benton says, “like conducting their lives by the stars. Mel’s a guru. He’s full of crap of course, but we get along. I never argue with the young.

  “His success is that he represents the revolt against the assembly lines. Not that a commune would suit me, but they have found a solution to the greatest problem of youth: loneliness. They live like artists, separate from society but with a sense of communion. We’ve got to have alternatives to the life we’re living, so I’ll hold my criticism in abeyance.”

  On January 19, 1975, Benton spent the day going back and forth about whether he should research and replace the locomotive seen in the background of The Sources of Country Music. In the end, he decided the painting was finished and went out to his studio to sign the mural, marking its completion. But before he could put his name to it, he experienced a massive heart attack. He died in his studio, his final mural forever unsigned. “He died so beautifully,” Jessie Benton told filmmaker Ken Burns in his 1988 documentary about the painter. Mel may have been full of crap, but after Benton’s death, the property that the painter bequeathed to the Lyman Family, as well as the sales of some of his art, would only strengthen Lyman’s empire. There were plenty of American communes and cults in the late sixties and seventie
s, but none that were financially floated by the estate of a legendary American artist.

  Post–Jug Band, Jim Kweskin and Mel Lyman kept recording and making music, but the tone and content of the songs changed from goofy to serious, ebullient to contemplative. On some bootlegs of recordings made during this period by the Fort Hill Community, the music is understated and melancholy, just about as far from Jug Band music as you can get. Some of the songs are downright eerie, like a cover of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that sounds straightforward, save for the fingers drifting all over the piano without regard to key or melody, placing a fog of menace over the tune.

  According to his contract, Kweskin still owed one album to Warner/Reprise, even though the Jug Band had broken up. After becoming friendly with label president Mo Ostin, Kweskin convinced him to visit Fort Hill to see his new way of life and hear his new sound. Ostin reportedly dug the songs and liked Mel Lyman; a deal was struck. The result, elaborately titled Richard D. Herbruck Presents Jim Kweskin’s America Co-starring Mel Lyman and the Lyman Family (1971), is the only official Kweskin/Lyman collaboration recorded and commercially released post–Jug Band. It also happens to be fantastic—the sort of record you might make a bar-stool argument for as a classic. Like Astral Weeks, there isn’t an electric instrument to be found on the recording. In the liner notes, Kweskin boldly declared, “I am singing America to you and it is Mel Lyman. He is the new soul of the world.” When I ask one of the session musicians about the LP’s credits insisting he had “come down from Alaska to play the dobro,” Mayne Smith tells me, “I was living in North Oakland and have never been to Alaska.” All of this aside, America remains an engaging album to experience. Upon release, sales were scant and reviews were often just excuses to trash the cult mentality surrounding the whole affair. Ostin couldn’t do much; he had his hands full with a short-tempered Van Morrison, who was insisting that the label president “promise him” a #1 single off Tupelo Honey. After America fizzled and Felton’s exposé was published, Ostin declined to comment on anything related to Mel Lyman.