Thinking along similar lines, Charles M. Holley and John Curtis Jones started Black Music Inc. in late ’68, with the intent of passing out shares to ordinary citizens in Roxbury. Instead of one black performer becoming extremely wealthy—and instead of allowing whites to rip off black artists—the setup would let the black community become invested in the production of their music. Black Music soon blossomed into more than a record company. After Riepen and Don Law moved the Boston Tea Party, Holley and Curtis snatched up the lease and opened a private club, the Common Ground, in September 1969. For $15 a year, anyone could hang out and make music at 53 Berkeley Street, five days a week.
Black Music Inc. not only grabbed the lease on the FHC’s former Film-Makers’ Cinematheque locale, they were also poised to move into the middle of their commune. Around this time period, the owner of 4 Fort Ave. Terrace wanted to remove the Lyman residents and sell the building to Holley and Jones. But because the Fort Hill Community had taken a crumbling house and turned it into a well-constructed, vital part of their commune, the idea of the original owner profiting off their hard work—and of someone outside the Family living in the center of their commune—drove members so crazy that they began dismantling the building from the inside during the middle of the night. When the owner was about to sell to Black Music Inc., she discovered that where plumbing, walls, and floors had existed the week before, now there was just an empty shell.
A former member of the community explained to Rolling Stone what happened next: “Naturally the neighborhood became enraged. There was a meeting between Black Music Inc. and Fort Hill, sort of as a prevention of war. A bunch of our guys went down there, and I remember at one point we said, ‘OK, if you want a war, we’ll give it to you!’ And as I say, we were ready, we had guns and everything.” When the frustrated owner of 4 Fort Ave. Terrace finally sold the house at a bargain price to the Fort Hill Community, the first thing they did was raze the property to the ground. Bewildered, Rolling Stone’s David Felton asked why.
An anonymous source replied, “The point is, you see, we live for the moment.”*
One Family member, Ed Fox, said in 1968, “Black power is beautiful, man, and it’s good for Negroes to do their thing. But we’re into our own scene. They’re parallel movements.” It sounded supportive, but it also sounded a lot like the same old call for segregation cloaked in hippie garb. This brand of casual racism would pale in comparison to the overt racism that awaited the city; the legal battle over school busing in the mid-1970s would turn South Boston into a hate-filled war zone, branding the city with a reputation for embracing bigots that resonates with some observers even to this day.
* * *
• • •
THE ACTION RETURNED to Marsh Chapel on October 1, 1968.
The long, hot summer had drawn to a close, with leaves starting to dot the plaza outside of the church. Inside, approximately one hundred students gathered around Raymond Kroll and Thomas Pratt. Both had recently gone AWOL from their military duties; the idea was to protect them in a way that would double as a visible act of protest. The idea of offering sanctuary to AWOL soldiers was a new maneuver for the Vietnam resistance movement, a tactic pioneered in May at Arlington Street Church. Few believed it would hold any legal weight, but the symbolic power of the gesture would equal that of dozens of protests.
Kroll and Pratt’s arrival marked the first time Marsh Chapel was used as such a sanctuary. At the end of the first night, something strange happened: Private Pratt donned a disguise and escaped via the chapel’s rear door, claiming he’d been manipulated. Kroll remained, telling reporters, “The Resistance and the School of Theology are not using me in any way for anybody’s gain except mine.” Was it all a complex stunt to make the resistance look bad? Would Kroll follow Pratt? Over the next few days, more students arrived. A cafeteria and medical station materialized, while rock bands played in the same basement where Leary and his crew tried to attain the divine via chemicals. By Wednesday, a thousand people were protecting Kroll at Marsh Chapel. From the pulpit, Howard Zinn expressed his support for the “ongoing free-speech exercise,” wondering if the chapel’s role as a safe haven might become permanent.
As cop cars repeatedly cruised down Commonwealth Avenue to keep an eye on the situation, Kroll’s lawyer announced inside that his client wanted to be “taken out physically as a symbolic act.” Early Sunday morning, FBI agents entered Marsh Chapel to find young people sleeping in the pews. “This is the FBI,” an agent barked, as others swarmed the church looking for Kroll. “We will give you fifteen seconds to clear the aisle.”
Kroll, a scrawny eighteen-year-old, went limp, but the agents grabbed hold of him as if he were a wild bull. Outside, a Liberation News Service photographer snapped a stunning shot of Kroll, his face in agony, his shirt ripped to shreds. The agents on the left and right of Kroll looked away, but the one up front, an older man in a black Stetson, smiled as he wrenched Kroll’s hand. By the following week, the photo was etched into the heads of resisters nationwide.
The incident broke activist Alex Jack’s patience and perhaps his sanity. “The Sanctuary at Marsh Chapel has shown, simply, that there can be no sanctuary . . . from oppression, from racism, from militarism,” he wrote in the BU News. “No place is sacred.” Forget about incremental progress; for Jack, it was time for a revolution, the birth of a new society where “exploitation is structurally impossible, where power is returned and exercised by the people, where there is no distinction between religion, politics, or art, where in short there are no sanctuaries because no one is oppressed.”
From Timothy Leary’s Good Friday Experiment to the celebration and mourning of Martin Luther King, from the fantastic visions of Russell H. Greenan to the broken sanctuary for two deserters, Marsh Chapel is one of those landmarks that seem to act as a lightning rod during this wrenching time in the nation’s life.
Sometimes advocates for peace are killed. Sometimes it seems like you can communicate directly with God—or that maybe you are God. Sometimes you refuse to fight, but the war comes to you anyway.
“Rise up,” Alex Jack wrote in the wake of Raymond Kroll’s capture, “and utterly destroy this universe.”
ELEVEN
We Have All Been Astrals Many Times
A WEEK BEFORE members of the Fort Hill Community and Avatar staff turned a Club 47 benefit show into a chair-smashing, face-punching disaster, the underground newspaper suddenly announced that Mel Lyman would no longer write for the newspaper. In the previous issue, the “Letters to Mel” section was half praise, half questioning his claim to being God—business as usual. The issue even ended with an uncharacteristically sweet Lyman poem about hope for the future. So it came as a shock to readers when they opened issue 22 to see the news, along with Lyman’s last “To All Who Would Know” piece, below the spookiest photo of him yet:
I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone
I am going to turn ideals to shit
I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe SOMEONE will be able to see SOMETHING as it really is
WATCHOUT
On the same page as the announcement was the self-referential declaration: “BUT MEL LYMAN IS THE AVATAR.”
It was a perplexing move. Why would the Fort Hill Community sabotage its one reliable, popular form of communication? The FHC still boasted about what they were going to produce—one follower stated that their company, United Illuminating, would one day “be the only company in the entire world, building model cities for a new world and making the stars shine at night.” But outside of Avatar, they had little to show for their grand ambitions. Lyman kept referencing films he was about to make and release, bu
t the public never saw them. When it came to music—one of the group’s undeniable talents—they pursued concerts and recordings in an odd manner as well. When audiences showed up to hear the Lyman Family’s music, they could instead be subjected to a “dialogue with the audience until [Kweskin and Lyman] felt confident that the audience was really present, really open-hearted and ready for whatever was to happen,” as Kindman wrote in his memoir. “The music thus became a reward for the audience for making the musicians feel welcomed and understood spiritually.” Unsurprisingly, fights broke out at these shows.
People from all over the world had been showing up on Fort Hill to check out the scene. But as Mel’s fame grew, protective measures became necessary. He was never in the Avatar office; as editor Charles Giuliano put it, Lyman’s contributions were done by “remote control.” Not all of Avatar’s writers cared for this setup. “One day in the late spring of 1968,” according to a Fusion piece about the FHC, “a powerfully built black man, who wrote under the name of Pebbles, made his way to the top of Fort Hill and demanded to see Mel. No one could stop him, and he went right to Mel’s house and knocked on the door.” (Everyone I asked about Pebbles’s full name had no clue: “He was just Pebbles.”) Jessie Benton answered, and the two argued. The Avatar contributor told Jessie Benton that he was God, more powerful than Mel Lyman.
This incident upset Jessie and Mel.* Some believed that what happened next was due to a dream their leader had, but it was most certainly a reaction to Pebbles’s visit: Mel ordered the Fort Hill Community to cease all other activities—including work on Avatar—and construct a wall around his house.* “The people outside of Fort Hill were thrown into turmoil,” Paul Mills wrote in Fusion. “They had obligations to advertisers, they had articles and news to publish, but the Fort Hill editors had abandoned Avatar.” The wall stands to this day.
When Avatar No. 24 arrived in late April, there was no news section, just the inner magazine that included all of the FHC’s content, which for this issue comprised page after page of photos of Alison Peper on LSD. Kindman, one of the few community members with actual experience publishing an underground newspaper, recalled it being a “declaration of spiritual war by Mel.”
On the cover, under a photo of fourteen men proudly standing by their work-in-progress, was an ominous note.
You know
what we’ve been doing
up here on Fort Hill?
We’ve been building a wall around Mel’s house
out of
heavy, heavy stone.
The issue represented Mel and the FHC “thumbing their noses at the other members of the Avatar alliance, challenging them to get with the Hill’s program or split,” Kindman wrote. Tensions between the Hill and Valley people—non–Family members who worked on Avatar—had been building for months.* Pebbles and the stone wall brought things to a head.
A meeting was called on the Hill. Around a large table at 4 Fort Ave. Terrace, the two parties gathered to discuss the goal of the newspaper. Charles Giuliano represented the Valley contingent, and Mel Lyman, of course, spoke for the Hill people. Here were two old friends—who had gone on road trips together, once shared the same girlfriend, and reached astronomical levels of intoxication together at 23 Kenwood—now facing each other as bitter opponents. The entire meeting was being recorded. “I was struck by the intensity of the conversation and the emotions being exchanged,” Kindman recalled, “and by the seeming contempt in which the non-Hill people were being held. There seemed to be no room for compromise.”
There was no compromise, but there was a capitulation. The Valley writers could continue publishing a newspaper, but they couldn’t call it Avatar. That was fine with Giuliano, who went immediately to work on non-Avatar. Issue 25 ended up containing all the best elements of the news section of Avatar: an article on Boston’s controversial urban development plan, a think piece titled “What Is the Underground?,” news about Roxbury and Somerville, as well as an article by “William Andrews,” wherein he dispelled common myths about drugs. The cover had no logo or title, but Ed Beardsley decided to place a reversed Avatar logo on the inside cover. Readers who held the paper up to the light would see it seep through, winking that the publication was still, secretly, the one and only Avatar.
“Mel was furious,” Michael Kindman recalled. “In retaliation, he ordered his ‘boys’ to take action.” This was war. Up on the Hill, David Gude had a plan: The FHC should seize the unauthorized Avatars before they hit the streets.
The heist kicked off at 4:30 a.m. on May 11. A run of 45,000 issues had just arrived at 37 Rutland Street, “the bundles still warm from the presses,” according to Family member Brian Keating. Inside, the only staff present was Pebbles, who was either working late or living at the office. Pebbles stalled the Fort Hill mob, but eventually they loaded the papers into their cars. Charles Giuliano notified the police, who laughed when they heard what had happened to his precious underground newspaper. The fleet of Fort Hill cars zoomed back to Highland Park, where every faux-Avatar was locked up inside the Cochituate Standpipe.
Giuliano was devastated. “For the better part of a week there were negotiations, threats, scenes,” Giuliano told Rolling Stone. “Fort Hill invited us all up for a big steak dinner at [Jim] Kweskin’s house, and we tried to iron it all out.” But the outcome of this meeting had already been determined by Mel Lyman. As the two parties argued, Kindman and some other FHC members removed issue 25 from the tower and sold it for scrap paper, converting an expensive print into thirty-five bucks. At the end of dinner, the downtown editors were informed about what had just happened to issue 25. The message was clear: If the Lyman Family wasn’t going be part of Avatar, there would be no Avatar.
After consulting the paper’s original charter, the Valley team’s lawyer saw a clear path to victory. “We called a board meeting,” Dave Wilson says, “and simply voted the entire staff out.” The Fort Hill contingent didn’t object, and begged Wilson not to subpoena Mel, as it would constitute a parole violation. Wilson and Giuliano were legally allowed to continue to publish a paper called Avatar without input from Fort Hill.
After slaving over the first issue of the new paper for weeks, Ed Beardsley, livid that he had been passed over for the lead role in Zabriskie Point in favor of Mark Frechette,* destroyed the entire ready-to-print newspaper overnight. Just how much of his action was fueled by anger about Zabriskie’s casting and how much might have been secret revenge instructions from Mel Lyman cannot be determined (“Beardsley was the perfect double agent for Mel; he didn’t know who he was from day to day,” Giuliano comments). Giuliano and Wilson laboriously removed the crumpled layout from the trash and slowly re-created it. “It was not a great artistic triumph, but we did it,” Giuliano told Rolling Stone. “We did it. We did the fucking paper.”
Some referred to it as Avatar II or The Boston Avatar, and if you didn’t know any better, you might have thought it was business as usual, judging from the front cover during its six-issue run that summer. Inside, however, was all news, no Mel. Wilson thought they were the best issues they ever did, serving the community at large.
Dave Wilson quit Avatar II in the early summer of 1968 to refocus on Broadside of Boston, the long-running music publication that was a model for Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy. Wilson never fell in line with the worship of Mel Lyman like Crawdaddy’s Williams did, but he holds no grudges. “I think of Mel rather fondly,” Wilson says, laughing, “but I didn’t agree with 99 percent of what he was up to.” When Wilson left Avatar II, he sent Lyman a letter explaining that the struggle was over and wishing him good luck. Days later, two of Lyman’s foot soldiers appeared at Wilson’s door with a crystal decanter of marijuana as a peace offering. “Mel said that was the most spiritual letter he’s ever received,” one of the men told Wilson. “I heard the rumors,” Wilson says, “that maybe Mel didn’t actually die. I really don’t know. He was always a really gaunt, asce
tic-looking person. I’d guess he died, perhaps from diabetic causes.” With Wilson gone, Giuliano couldn’t keep Avatar II afloat much longer. He agrees with Wilson’s guess that their former friend died of complications from diabetes. “I could be wrong,” Giuliano says. “But Mel was into total self-indulgence. If there’s something that’s taboo, do it to the max. His idea of a really good time was to sit there and eat a pound of fudge. Mel could eat a pound of fudge. And so at some point he lost all his teeth. And so I think he probably abused his body in a way that caught up with him.”
Starting in October 1968, a new, glossy magazine from the FHC arrived. American Avatar made no pretense of covering local politics, but did run a fair amount of national political content, filtered through what Family members called Hill Philosophy. “Today the great people are the musicians, the actors, the filmmakers, the COMMUNICATORS!” Lyman declared in the first issue. “The spirit that begat this country is playing a new instrument . . . Let the Nixons and Humphreys and Wallaces keep house for us, we have a lot of work to do.”
The Fort Hill Community tried to expand their audience beyond Boston, passing the magazine out to festivalgoers at Woodstock. But American Avatar folded after four issues. Without a print outlet, things got weirder on the Hill.* Increasingly, Lyman dictated his followers’ sleeping, bathing, and sexual schedules. One day all the Tauruses would be asked to leave the Hill; the next, a prohibition on having children would be announced. “Mel was making plans to accelerate the rate of change on the Hill, to intensify the internal struggle each of us was going through,” Kindman wrote. “We found clues everywhere.” When the Beatles’ White Album arrived later that year, Kindman and his friends swore they heard a message buried in the garbled collage of “Revolution 9”: “Here’s to Mel, king of the world.”
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