Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  At 4:50 p.m. on Wednesday, August 29, 1973, Mark Frechette approached a woman at a desk outside of the teller station and asked her about a loan. She told him she was assisting some other patrons, but her associate could help. Mark told the second bank employee he needed a $2,500 loan. “I’ve got a steady job,” he nervously told her as he slid a note across the table. It read: There are three of us, we’re going to rob you, don’t get alarmed. She waved a security guard over; Mark revealed his gun and instructed him to place his weapon on the desk. The guard then led Mark and Terry—Fort Hill member Sheldon T. Bernhard—back into the tellers’ area. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Mark told the staff. The employee at the loan desk triggered the silent alarm. Each teller station cleaned out their till into Mark’s suitcase. The total take was $10,156.

  The third Hill person, Chris Thien—nicknamed Herc—was in the foyer, disguised as a security guard. Two police officers sped to the location within minutes of the alarm. The first officer, patrolman Daniel Fitzgerald, rushed through the front door and tried to disarm Herc, who managed to throw the officer to the ground. As patrolman Maurice Flaherty approached, he spotted his partner on the ground and fired his gun twice, hitting Herc both times. Inside, Mark and Terry watched in horror as their friend fell to the ground. “Put your hands up!” the officers screamed, moving into the main area of the bank. Once Terry and Mark were disarmed, two doctors who had witnessed the robbery wanted to attend to Herc, but the police wouldn’t allow it. He was carried on a stretcher to nearby Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. “In committing their act,” former FHC member Michael Kindman wrote, “they answered a question I had been considering for a long time: who would be the first to die for, or because of, Mel?”

  Mark and Terry were held at the Charles Street Jail on bail of $2,500, the same dollar amount as the fake loan they had inquired about, which neither could afford. There was a theory that a fourth member of the Fort Hill Community had been involved with the robbery: A line of fishing wire had been tied around Herc’s leg, and the cops assumed it led to a getaway car whose driver could give a tug if he saw police. “It must have gotten tangled on his leg as we walked over,” Frechette offered.

  Why did they do it? One of the first stories had Frechette telling the police he was “evicted from the commune for non-payment of rent the week before he was arrested on the robbery charge.” Frechette is never quoted saying this again, but the reason makes sense: Frechette loved Lyman and the community so much, even choosing it over romantic love with Daria Halprin. If the community had evicted their superstar for missed rent, he would have tried anything to get back in. Two decades later, Beverly Walker told Film Comment that “Mark would not cooperate with his own defense because it would’ve meant turning against Mel Lyman.”

  Another motive appeared in the Globe. “We did it as a revolutionary act of political protest,” Frechette claimed. “We had been watching the Watergate hearings on television. . . . We saw the apathy and we felt an intense rage. . . . Because banks are federally insured, robbing that bank was a way of robbing Richard Nixon without hurting anybody. . . . We just reached the point where all that the three of us really wanted to do was hold up a bank. And besides . . . standing there with a gun, cleaning out a teller’s cage—that’s about as fuckin’ honest as you can get, man.” The press was primed to jump on this claim; in August 1973, the nation’s biggest political scandal was dominating the news. Coconspirator Terry Bernhard still cites this as the motive. “It was a revolutionary act. Money? Yeah, sure, I need some money,” he told a documentary filmmaker in 2008. “But I certainly didn’t want to rob a bank. . . . I tried to talk them out of it.”*

  A week after the facts of the case were reported, an in-depth feature on Mark and the incident appeared in just about every newspaper in town. (The Globe even mocked Mel Lyman’s signature style in the opening: “Mark Frechette has spent the past week in cell 104, Charles Street Jail. He’s had time to reflect on what he’s been DOING and what he’s been NEGLECTING.”) Additional motives were floated. “The anger was in those boys,” Jessie Benton said. “It was real hard for them. We had 16 kids to feed, and we can’t buy meat. To me, robbing a bank is like robbing the government. Everybody’s money is insured.” From inside their cells, Mark and Terry realized that the sixties were long gone. “We haven’t changed,” Frechette said. “Everybody else is gone. Where did they go?” The Lyman Family just didn’t seem cut out to handle the changes that the 1970s had in store for society. “Much of what Mark was saying . . . seemed oddly out of synch with the decade,” Vin McLellan wrote in the Phoenix. “Apparently in the isolation of the Fort Hill community there still lives a few bits of 1966.”

  For the first time since the negative Rolling Stone exposé, local reporters made their way up the hill and into 5 Fort Ave. Terrace. Passing through the “Tolkien Hobbit” wall built around Mel’s house, they were greeted by beautiful women in “oddly formal” cocktail dresses. In a room dubbed the Connection—a room built to join two houses on Fort Ave. Terrace—George Peper, Jessie Benton, and Faith Gude were ready to explain how their friends had made an honest, rational decision to rob that bank.

  The Real Paper’s Joe Klein—the future Primary Colors author—went up first.

  JOE: “Was the bank robbery a way of standing up for the truth?”

  JESSIE: “We haven’t changed. But we’ve watched as the society around us changed—all the hope for this country is going down the drain with assassination, fizzled revolutionaries.”

  FAITH: “The motivation for the ripoff was a product of where this country is at. We’ve sat and watched Watergate week after week. And so, in desperation, those boys did up front what the government was doing in secret.”

  JOE: “But they had guns.”

  JESSIE: “Yes, and the first chamber in each of the guns was empty. There wouldn’t have been any violence if that bank teller hadn’t pushed that silent alarm and called the cops. To us, the big question is, what was that teller protecting? Was pushing that button worth Chris’ life?”

  FAITH: “It was a way of keeping Watergate alive. They weren’t simply three thugs.”

  JOE: “What does it mean for your future? Are you going to start knocking off banks now?”

  JESSIE: “We don’t know. We’re in great darkness and we know a change is coming.”*

  Mel was nowhere to be found. He was traveling, they told Klein. They passed along his only message, the hope that Herc hadn’t died in vain. Klein proceeded down to the Charles Street Jail to check in with Frechette. “Before, when I was out on the street,” he said, “there had been something inside me, something that stopped me from stepping in line, getting in place . . . I kept landing in jail and fucking up.”

  “But you’re back in jail now, aren’t you?” Klein asked. “Is it any different now than it was before?” It was as if it was the first time in years that someone outside of the Lyman Family had finally made a valid point that Frechette could understand.

  “I never asked myself that,” he said. “That’s a hell of a question.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN APRIL 1974, Mark Frechette and Sheldon “Terry” Bernhard pleaded guilty upon recommendation of their lawyer Harvey Silverglate, the same man who helped the community through the Avatar obscenity trials. There was no defense to be mounted. The two men were sentenced to six to fifteen years. Inside prison, other bank robbers found it hilarious that Terry and Mark had no idea they needed to be out of the building within two minutes to successfully pull off the heist.

  Though it might not have been an actual motive, Mark and Terry were truly obsessed with the Watergate scandal. “They call themselves the ‘Stars in Stripes,’” Tom Snyder told the NBC viewing audience in late March 1975. “Fifteen inmates at the prison colony in Norfolk, Massachusetts, who spent the weekend reenacting the Watergate crimes behind bars. The
prisoners performed their version of the White House transcripts, complete with an exact replica of the president’s Oval Office. The play was directed by Mark Frechette.” Terry, wearing a prosthetic nose, was Nixon. “I held up a bank and got five to 16,” he told a reporter. “Nixon held up a country, and he got a pardon.”

  Frechette had hand-selected murderers and thieves from the prison yard to play Watergate figures such as H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. “I’d love it if Nixon were here tonight,” Terry said. “Especially if he were wearing a blue shirt.” The opening night audience included Senator Ted Kennedy and Edward Brooke, the former Massachusetts D.A. who was involved in both the Strangler and Titicut legal cases. “The president [and his collaborators] were portrayed tonight by convicts,” one prisoner told reporter Mike Barnicle. “That’s gotta shake you. Just a little bit.”

  Then, six months later, on September 27, 1975, Mark Frechette was found dead in the Norfolk County Prison weight room. A 150-pound barbell was on his neck. He was twenty-seven.

  In the weeks leading up to his death, Frechette had lost weight and sunk into a deep depression. “Being in that kind of a place for someone like Mark was absolutely hell,” Bernhard recalled. Prison officials had listed him as having “questionable stability” and scheduled him for an October psychiatric appointment. Was his death a freak accident? Suicide? Foul play? The prison officially ruled the death as the first; both Silverglate and Beverly Walker suspected the last. “We were close to getting out. We would’ve gotten parole in a couple of months,” Bernhard sadly noted in 2008.

  Mark Frechette’s tragic story became a permanent part of Zabriskie Point. It all seemed beyond coincidence, as if his own life were a movie that transformed him from an anonymous carpenter, to a famous actor and devotee of Mel Lyman, to a criminal acting in jail. With no experience, he was cast by one of the most famous directors in the world based on his everyday behavior. His character was named Mark; he was wanted for murder. On-screen and on the streets, he was the confused rebel with a gun.

  Terry Bernhard, the remaining survivor of the bank robbery, served his term and returned to the Fort Hill Community. He played piano on Jim Kweskin’s 1979 Side by Side album. He still resides with his fellow Hill members, sometimes performing with local jazz trios. The prison where he was initially held after the failed holdup is now a luxury hotel called the Liberty, featuring a bar and nightclub named Alibi and Clink, respectively.

  * * *

  • • •

  “IT WAS A good bank robbery,” Frechette had told the press from jail. “Maybe it wasn’t a successful one, but it was real, ya know?”

  SEVEN

  I Saw You Coming from the Cape

  IT’S POSSIBLE THAT no one besides Peter Wolf has heard any recording of Van Morrison’s various Boston lineups since they toured around New England in the summer of 1968. Even the musicians who made up the Belfast singer’s first steady, American live band haven’t heard Wolf’s bootleg. Wolf himself hasn’t listened to his tapes of the Van Morrison Controversy performing at the Catacombs in over a decade, as he explained to me while staring at the boxes containing the reels on his bookshelf.

  After I publish a brief account of meeting with Wolf, conjecture about these Boston tapes bubbles up on assorted online message boards and the pages of Uncut magazine, but no one brags about hearing them. What did the Astral Weeks songs sound like before producer Lewis Merenstein’s jazz ringers got hold of them? Was the album’s timeless vibe invented on the spot, in the studio, or was the foundation laid down in Boston? And what did the songs sound like before Van had his midsummer night’s dream about getting rid of electric instruments?

  Online, the bottom of an old Boston Tea Party poster, for a series of 1968 shows, catches my eye: “The Van Morrison Controversy and The Road Light Show can be seen on WGBH-TV, Wednesday May 29th, 7:30 PM–8 PM.” Could audio and video of a Boston lineup be moldering in the basements of WGBH? David Atwood, who directed WGBH’s Mixed Bag—a half-hour show presenting local rock and jazz bands—is the man who would know. A natural archivist, Atwood has a home collection of tapes of his directorial work, and a pocket calendar detailing what he did every day at WGBH. Consulting his notes, he confirms that the show aired that night. My hopes start to soar, even after he tells me that the episode is not in his personal archive, but might be in WGBH’s. A few days later, bad news: This episode is nowhere to be found.

  In 2016, the rest of Van’s Boston players emerge from the woodwork, eager to talk. One of them is drummer Joey Bebo, who multiple sources claimed was deceased. Over a plate of nachos, Bebo jokes that for all this time he thought they had all disappeared. Now retired from his job as a computer programmer, he’s become a prolific writer of what he calls techno-thrillers. In one, a scientist discovers a powerful telescope, then goes missing. Plot twists ensue. By the time he’s rescued, he’s invented “a ray to look back into the past.”

  Bebo arrived from Plattsburgh, New York, to attend the Berklee School of Music in 1966. In the early spring of 1968, one of his classmates, bassist Tom Kielbania, invited him to audition for Morrison. Bebo wasn’t thrilled at first, dismissing Them’s “Gloria” as “teenybopper stuff.” But he was in no position to turn down a paid job: His parents had caught wind of his penchant for pot, and he felt the pressure of supporting himself. “If it wasn’t jazz or serious soul, I just wasn’t interested,” Bebo recalls. “I was about to work with one of the best songwriters and singers of all time and I didn’t have a clue.”

  En route to guitarist John Sheldon’s home off Harvard Square, Bebo and Kielbania got stoned out of their skulls. The sideburned Bebo looked like a pirate, in purple shirt and bell-bottoms; Sheldon gave off the vibe of a “preppy vampire” in his red blazer; Kielbania had stringy hair, dark shades, and frumpy clothes. Van sat silently in the corner. When it was time to play, they ripped into “Gloria,” Bebo keeping his eyes on Van, looking for tempo and dynamics. Next up in the audition: “Brown Eyed Girl,” featuring an aggressive rock guitar line, Bebo says, like “Jimi Hendrix meets Bob Marley.” Bebo got the job.

  The band learned more than two dozen songs for their summer tour. In the weeks leading up to the first show, there were backyard games of Frisbee and lunches in Harvard Square. But even during breaks, it was difficult to get Morrison talking. The only time you could get definitive opinions out of the singer was by asking him about other performers. Tom Kielbania would mention another band, and Morrison would usually sum them up as “those faggots.” The trash talk would flow freely after Morrison had a few drinks. Bebo remembered Van saying that he couldn’t smoke dope due to “burning my brain on hash when I was younger.” (Janet Planet concurred with this assessment. “He was absolutely drinking back then. Alcohol is definitely his drug of choice. He doesn’t need anything to expand his mind any further. . . . He needs the downer—the closer-offer.”) Bebo says Morrison drank heavily before taking the stage, every single show.

  “I had never been in a group that did everything together like this before,” Bebo says. “Most of my career I simply showed up for work with my drums and that was the extent of it. Van’s band was different.” Another difference was the pay. Bebo got $150 a week for rehearsal and $150 per show, no matter what the end-of-night payout was. (Kielbania recalls it as being $50.) Morrison also employed two roadies for each performance.

  For Bebo, who had recently visited Van and Janet’s less-than-palatial Cambridge digs, this was a confusingly large sum. Where was it all coming from? Eventually he pieced together that Morrison already had financial backers by the start of summer. According to Janet Planet, a Boston-based music manager named Richard asked Van to move to the city, play some gigs, and be managed by him. “He was not affiliated with a company at all,” she says. “It turned out he was not an effective manager, although he certainly got us out of a tight spot in [New York].” But Morrison jettisoned Richard after realizing he was “a complete whacko�
�� who told at least one band member that he was associated with the Cosa Nostra. Kielbania says a man named Frank booked all of Morrison’s New England concerts that summer.

  Regardless of who was funding the touring, or how much money exactly was behind it, many elements of it remained shoestring. The band crammed into a junky van to drive out of the city for their first show together at the Rainbow Ballroom and Rollerdome in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. Finally warming up to his new bandmates, Morrison told them stories of touring with Them. At the Rollerdome, Morrison, Bebo, and Kielbania drank beers in the van while Sheldon and the roadies set up. A cop knocked on the window: It was against the law to sit and drink in a parked car. He pulled them out of the van for questioning in front of a line of kids waiting to get in to see them play.

  The manager kicked up a fuss, asking if the cop knew that the man in the van was a star; the cop said he didn’t care if they were the Beatles. The promoter brought up the fact that the police were getting paid to oversee a concert tonight, and if Van Morrison and his players were going to be arrested, there would be no show. Morrison fumbled through a mea culpa: “We didn’t mean disrespect. We do it all the time back home.” The police finally dropped the act, and the band rushed to the stage, where a throng of teenage girls had gathered. Bebo thinks Morrison was especially nervous during the incident with the cops because of deportation fears. The anxiety turned electric when the band started playing—“sizzled like cooked bacon,” per Bebo. When the band closed with “Brown Eyed Girl,” the audience erupted. As the band exited the Rollerdome, one of the cops said, “Not bad.”

  Packing up, Bebo saw Morrison do something odd. “There were a few girls standing around, all teenyboppers. All young girls. And Van goes up to one of them and he whispers in her ear. And her eyes go wide and she quickly walks away like she’s scared.”