Exhuming Bob 32: Didn’t We Ramble Though, A Review Of The Bob Dylan Show, Portland Performance 10/21/14
October 22, 2014
Exhuming Bob 32
Didn’t We Ramble Though
A Review Of The Bob Dylan Show, Portland Performance 10/21/14
by
R.E. Prindle
The steel is moanin’, the guitars are speakin’,
The piano plays a jelly roll.
The man on the drums is far from dumb,
The bassman he plays from his soul.
The tables are quakin’, and your nerves are shakin’
But you keep on beggin’ for more.
You’re havin’ your fun you lucky son of a gun
On that Honky Tonk hardwood floor.
Sung by the late great Johnny Horton
The Bob Dylan show dropped into town last night. And what a show it was. My first Dylan show, from reading all these reviews depicting the shows as atrocious my expectations were very low.
I can’t imagine what these critics are thinking. The Show was absolutely sensational. Dylan is one of the great Rock and Roll showmen. Beats anyone else I’ve ever seen.
I hope I can hit a stride here commensurate with the show and my muse doesn’t let me down. The venue, the Keller Auditorium, is a twenty-five hundred capacity house and it was filled. The stage is relatively big about sixty wide and fifty high. Bob and his musicians used the whole space like they had been performing there for a year. The lighting while minimal was dramatic, effective and beautiful putting one in a good mood. An aura was provided that brought one into the Secret Garden.
The electronic gear seemed to be artfully scattered haphazardly across the whole stage. The musicians wore red blazers while Bob came out in a white planter’s outfit, uniting the Templars with the old plantation down South. Jeb Stuart rides again.
The musicians appeared to be encamped among the gear with the lead and rhythm guitarists to the audience’s left. The drum stand was middle as is proper flanked by the bass player and finally a steel guitar player cum banjoist on the right end. Bob’s keyboard was forward and on a level with the steel. It was all very minimalist and effective. They filled the stage while being placed in perspective by the high fifty foot frame keeping everything human size. Dylan must have been studying performance art under Yoko.
It is a mistake to go to the concert to hear Dylan sing. He apparently learned to vocalize by singing along to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. At first I thought it was a cabover with two cylinders not hitting coming up a mountain grade hauling a hundred thousand K in triple bottoms. Then I saw that it was Bob. The music is the thing; as a composer and conductor lies Bob’s genius.
The band was incredibly disciplined, everyone knew his role, fit tightly with the others and played their instruments without exhibitionism. The harmonics and spacing was incredible.
The drummer carried the band on his back. He was so sensational that like the Hindu elephant he could carry the world on his back. I mean, he had time in his hands, the money in his pocket and could walk the dog on a long leash. I haven’t seen anyone like that since Michael Shrieve. The guy was terrific, he couldn’t only play he looked good doing it. The bass player standing next to the kit kept the beat rolling forward. Bob understands the rhythm section. No amateurishness near.
While relatively unobtrusive the steel player was carrying a lot of the weight.
Now, the band doesn’t play any songs; what Bob has written is some sort of symphonic suite in several movements. The lead and rhythm play a succession of chord progressions loud; there is no melody as such. The music has a strong forward flow that sweeps along like the Mississippi in flood before it was channeled and diked.
The band set the crowd off from the first chord; it was all daylight from there. Like nearly everyone else I flipped to the ozone, shouting and howling, lost in the noise. Amazingly the audience responded differently to different chord progressions; sections would shoot from seats with a roar that competed with the amplification. It was like a huge sea of deep rollers rising and falling.
A wonderful crowd, best I’ve ever seen. Everyone looked good and went way into the show. There was no one not having the time of their life. Dylan was flattered and showed it, trying a little harder to deliver the goods.
His singing was irrelevant. Why he is charged with plagiarism is beyond me. I won’t say you couldn’t understand a word because I was able to snag a few while even getting a phrase or two- Tangled Up In Blue but he shouted that out in his normal voice.
If he was singing from his catalogue it was hardly noticeable although I did get the faint impression that one of them was She Belongs To Me. Either that or Love – Zero = No Limits, or something else, might have been The Star Spangled Banner. Didn’t matter, Bob had to do something to justify his being there. He had the band so tight they could have performed without him.
The band was the cake. The progressions were so powerful it was like Godzilla walking in rhythm. There were two sets and the first one was a power walk. Just unbelievable. If all Bob’s shows are like this one I can’t imagine what critics are belittling. Forget the singing, it’s some kind of frosting to add a little variety. So is Bob’s posturing. He struts around a little like the Lord of the Manse directing the slaves striking what I suppose are meant to be power poses.
The end of the first set leaves you exhausted but energized and hoarse. During the intermission most people didn’t leave their seats but in their high excitement there was a huge billowing roar rising up. I was in the first row, first balcony. It was a kindly roar, mellow even. Dylan’s fans are OK. No weirdos there regardless of Kinney’s book, The Dylanologists: Adventures In The Land Of Bob.
I was there with my wife and our friends Mark and Jenna, two old fans. On my left I sat next to a couple from Medicine Hat, Alberta who had driven down for the show. He was a wheat farmer with 600 acres. Using three John Deere combines he harvests all 600 acres in one day. Gives him a lot of leisure I suppose.
The second set was a little more frivolous lowering the energy level considerably. But, before you went to sleep he pepped it up a little ending on a power note.
I had heard that he doesn’t do encores but after a steady drum roll of applause for about ten minutes he and the band came back for not a one piece encore, but two, ending the show with a medium power progression while Bob mumbled the words to Blowing In The Wind apparently a very personal lyric. Ah, Hibbing.
By this time I had a firm grip on the situation paying attention to the band, but it is Bob’s band and I imagine that he has composed the music. As a composer he is no mean hand. I hesitate to say it but the music is at least as good as Beethoven although falling short of Mozart.
I don’t know how long the piece was but they must have given us five to ten minutes with the crowd and myself going wild. The woman four seats to my left had virtually taken leave of her senses screaming doing a wild gyration of a dance. Really spectacular.
OK, I confess it. I did some involuntary things myself. The band was really showing off their discipline and expertise. Now this is really spectacular, they were powering along then cut off simultaneously leaving a half beat silence before resuming at the same pace and volume. They did this three times in succession.
I sensed it coming on, now I’m not bragging because I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing, but in that brief half beat space was total silence. I shouted out a perfect rock and roll ‘hey’. I did it the second time slipping that hey into that narrow opening. Perfect timing on both our parts. I think the band was surprised by the first one then sort of amazed at the second one. Then consciousness came slipping back and I missed the third opening. It was still terrific.
As the encore drew to an end the cell phones came out and whole rows held them up to snap pictures. Endless tiny images shown back to up above. Bob came center stage to pose for the cameras while the band lined up behind him.
The band was terrific. Dylan was terrific, the whole show was breathtaking and invigorating. If you are being swayed by all the negative reviews, disregard them. Dylan’s show is a can’t miss situation. Carpe Diem! Good things don’t last forever.
Exhuming Bob 31a
A Review
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
by
Victor Maymudes
Review by
R.E. Prindle
It Ain’t Dark Yet
31a will concern itself with Chapter 1 only. Victor Maymudes while closely connected with Dylan has always been written of as a shadowy slightly malevolent character. My impression has been that he was an enforcer of some sort for Dylan.
In this his own memoir he is a friend, advisor and confidante. Maymudes, born in 1935, was six years older than Dylan who he met in 1961. Maymudes was already in a career in show business. In 1955 near the heart of the Beatnik era he had opened a folk club coffee house on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles called The Unicorn. He was subsequently advised by Jack Elliot who he was managing at that time to go to New York to take in a new performer who turned out to be Bob Dylan.
Elliot explained that Dylan was copying his act but doing it better. Ramblin’ Jack himself introduced Victor to Bob giving the latter a run down on Victor’s achievements. According to Victor he and the twenty year old Dylan hit it off immediately. They began to pal around.
Maymudes gives a slightly different view of this period than has yet been around. The first chapter covers the period from the Spring of ’61 to Dylan’s Carnegie Hall performance in the Fall of ’61.
According to Maymudes shortly after meeting Dylan they went on a long drive and walks around the perimeter of New York City.
To quote Victor:
Bob mentioned going to Juvenile Hall and how he quickly realized there was a social structure inside and either you are going to get along or you really shouldn’t be there.
Hopefully this should settle the issue of whether Dylan was incarcerated in Red Wing Reformatory of Minnesota. While the paper trail has always indicated he did yet his term has been denied by all. In what amounts to a self-admission this should settle the issue.
There is also a piece on the internet by someone who had been in Red Wing at an earlier time but said he knew someone who was in Red Wing at the same time as Bob. Dylan says according to Victor that in order to get along you had to go along. I take that as a reflection after the fact, while Bob probably held himself aloof from the other boys as his possible fellow prisoner as above said he did. No one has believed the article but there may be something to it.
At any rate it seems clear that Bob did serve a sentence which was very unpleasant for him as why wouldn’t it be. The stay had a devastating effect on his personality, as why not? Bob’s song The Walls Of Red Wing thus seems to be a personal reminiscence.
Some of Bob’s stories such as touring with a carnival while false as told seem to be based on actual facts while being definitely embroidered. In the same paragraph Victor says: He talked about going with the carnival when they came to town. I would take that to mean that perhaps he volunteered to help in setting up the carnival as an extra hand as was common. There were temporary jobs when the circus came to town. You could drive stakes for instance and maybe get a free ticket.
2.
It also seems clear that Bob’s family life was far from harmonious. The Zimmerman’s seemed to have covered up a lot. Maymudes, same paragraph, p.4:
He told me deeply personal stuff like his dad leaving town and how he would have to stay at his dad’s mother in Minneapolis, how she would tell him his mother was a whore, sleeping around with other men. It was the kind of thing that probably wasn’t true about his mother, but his grandmother was sticking up for his father and trying to use her power to distance Bob from his own mother. Terrible thing to do to a child.
Bob’s grandmother may have been telling tales about Bob’s mother but I think not. My impression at looking at her picture was that she was a goodtime girl. She certainly kept Abe broke buying her furs, jewels and Cadillacs.
In Dylan’s portrayal of his putative father and his mother in his movie Masked And Anonymous his alter ego Jack Fate’s father is portrayed on his death bed while his mother with a red dress on appears to be gallivanting about.
I find it hard to believe Dylan’s grandmother would say those things about his mother if she didn’t mean them. It is also the first time I’ve heard that Dylan’s mother and father separated from time to time. As such behavior is common knowledge in a small town like Hibbing Dylan’s life may have been made miserable partly from that cause. He certainly has no love lost for that period in his life.
3.
One major question everyone asks is why Robert Shelton wrote such a glowing review about a performance of Bob’s and why John Hammond gave a nondescript Bob a recording contract. Maymudes may shed some light on that. He says on p. 46:
Over the next week Bob and I ended up hanging out non-stop. We were together all the time. We would depart and arrange to meet the following day. Eventually we even exchanged numbers. We had extensive conversations about everything. During the day we would go see Fellini’s movies and stop by the happening clubs and cafes like the Bitter End. We would stay up till dawn each morning. I would introduce him to everyone I knew, like Richard Alderson, the guy you hear announcing bands at Woodstock. We went to Dave Von Ronk’s house and played our guitars. John Hammond Sr. had a house on lower MacDougal St. and we would go there too.
All this has to fit into a time frame of about six months but the interesting thing here is that Victor and Bob visited John Hammond Sr. apparently several times before Shelton’s New York Times article of 9/29/61 and Dylan signing a Columbia Records Contract with Hammond on 9/30/61. Did Hammond really have time to read the article and say to himself, I’ve got to find this boy and sign him by the next day? Astonishing on the face of it. It would seem to have been a plan.
No other writer, no biographer places Dylan at Hammond Sr.’s house before 9/30/61. But according to Maymudes, and why should he lie although he might misremember, Hammond and Dylan were familiar with each other as early as the summer of ’61. Hammond must have heard Dylan play and sing before Shelton’s article. Thus his behavior in the studio where he had Bob just play and sing into the microphone while he read the newspaper is more understandable.
While every other folk label in NYC had rejected Bob evidently Hammond saw and heard something they didn’t. It would seem highly improbable he could sign Bob’s nearly indiscernible talent on his own hook. It may be then that he conspired with Shelton who he surely would have known to write an extremely favorable review to be published in the premier newspaper in the country and then sign Dylan on the strength of that. As it was his prescience was not immediately justified as the record bombed.
At any rate the above scenario would make the article and signing plausible.
On the other hand Hammond may just have had the golden ears with which he is attributed. In that context my brother-in-law played me all four of Dylan’s first LPs in 1964 that I found excruciatingly painful to listen to. I thought Dylan was going nowhere but my brother-in-law said, you watch, this guy is going to be big. That goes to prove whatever Bob had could be heard but only apparently by the elect.
4.
The Winter and Spring of 1961-62 Victor was touring with his act Wavy Gravy who he managed. He then returned to New York where Dylan was now living with Suze Rotolo. They continued their friendship.
Dylan had returned to Minnesota that Winter and had just returned as Victor hit town. Bob was now looking for management. He discussed this with Victor, pp. 51-52
During our walks on this second trip to New York, Bob and I talked about the future. He asked me about Manny Greenhill and Albert Grossman; he was wondering who he should sign with. Manny Greenhill was managing Joan Baez and her commercial success was increasing every day. At the same time Dave Von Ronk’s wife was managing Bob, but he was ready for the next step. Flat out he asked me which one he should sign with. I asked him how traditional he wanted to be and how far he wanted to reach. Those questions appealed to him and he expressed he wanted to go the distance, more commercial than Greenhill was doing. His day-to-day routine didn’t point to someone who wanted to go mainstream; he was more folky and traditional at this point. But he knew what he wanted and where he wanted to go from the start. So I said Albert was the logical choice. He was much more aggressive and much more commercial. Bob signed with Grossman a few days later.
——-
Bob’s ability to bend and refashion words was like magic; he was the one that could break into the mainstream while still playing socially conscientious music. Bob believed in himself and so did I, and that’s why Albert entering the picture made sense. Albert had commercial connections and wouldn’t ask Bob to change his tune to fit in. With Albert’s help Bob could force his style in front of the broader public and ultimately make everyone else fit into what he was doing.
That’s a pretty good insider’s synopsis. Grossman who would soon launch Peter Paul and Mary on the back of Dylan’s songs certainly had recording connections although Warner Bros. at the time was fairly low down the list of successful, maybe unsuccessful, record companies. Anyway Bob was already signed to CBS, the actual premier recording company at the time.
Victor goes on to give an interesting thumbnail of Albert Grossman that is immediate and accurate.
Always handy with the advice Victor tells Albert how to go about handling Bob while at his own expense he was setting up Dylan’s first Carnegie Hall appearance, not the main stage but a side stage.
Victor says Albert took the concert away from him while it is usually attributed to Izzy Young. In the event nobody came and the show was a total financial loss. Victor had a falling out with Albert deciding for ‘spiritual’ reasons to depart for Yelapa Mexico. Apparently Victor had been inhaling too much from The Teaching Of Don Juan.
His last words to Bob at this time were that if he ever needed him to say to whoever he was standing next to, Get Victor, and he would come.
It was the Sixties you know.
That is the end of the revelations of Tape 1. A remarkable and interesting account. We do know that Victor and Bob were friends so barring any embroidery or misremembering the account should be accurate. If so, all biographies are now askew. The period has to be reexamined and reevaluated to include Victor’s account.
A Review: The Rock And Roll Circus Movie Of The Rolling Stones
September 12, 2014
A Review
The Rock And Roll Circus Movie
Of The Rolling Stones
by
R.E. Prindle
All Dressed Up For The Party
In December 1968 Mick Jagger decided to make a film, or rather, he shot the film having decided earlier. Perhaps he was inspired by The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour of the previous year. These years from 1966 to 1968-69 were a tumultuous time for Jagger and his sidekick Keith Richards. Not least significant was that Mick had taken up with the songstress Marianne Faithfull. Then in 1967 there was perhaps the most famous drug bust in history at Keith’s Redlands house.
The boys had been pushing the drug envelope hard more or less inviting a crackdown and it came in 1967 involving Mick, Keith and Marianne with devastating results for all three characters in the drama.
As the authorities wished to make an example of the baddest boys of rock and roll Mick and Keith received prison sentences of which however they only served two or three days. Nevertheless their psyches had been criminalized, changed their views on their role in society.
While the arrest and jail time were merited in society’s eyes, Mick and Keith who were among the legions marching to Altruria on the wings of pot convinced that their elders had irrevocably messed the world up while they were going to set it right under the influence of marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and whatever else was handy, saw the bust and conviction as unjustified interference in their dreams of perfection.
The revolution was on as far as they were concerned hence they began a string of songs along the lines of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy For The Devil, unintended consequences of the bust.
Oh yeah, Mick and Marianne, Keith and his main squeeze Anita Pallenberg had become involved in Satanism which was going around like the flu. Not necessarily dilettantish either like, say, I just read a great book by Satan, but the real kind as fostered by the Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley himself as interpreted by his epigoni Kenneth Anger and Anton LaVey, not to mention the Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Mick and Marianne disavow any serious interest in Satanism but the Rock and Roll Circus contradicts that.
Combined with these irritants in their lives Mick had just starred in a Satanic movie, Performance, and Marianne had had the misfortune of a miscarriage. To say that they weren’t suffering at the time they made their movie would be a understatement.
In this hazy mental state, compounded by too many drugs, Mick cobbled together his Circus.
What is the meaning of the title Circus? Ostensibly it meant literally a circus, after all it had a fire eater and trapeze artists. However it could also be a double entendre. Just as the title of their 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, parodied the Queens request on passports so the word Circus also parodied the name the British intelligence agency gave to their gig. The title can be construed as a challenge to the establishment. It would seem clear then that Mick was still seething inside because of Redlands.
His film is negligible as a movie but a good concert film. The symbolism is non stop as the guest audience in dressed in some sort of Munchkin costumes. The cast was bizarre to say the least. While little more than a musical oddity Jethro Tull led by Ian Anderson in his disgusting dirty old man persona opens the show while he was followed by the Who caught in pre-Tommy persona. Never one of my favorite bands, others thought they were a good performance while we are treated to a young Pete Townshend doing a series of his trademark windmills.
The couple circus acts are entertaining enough; the fire eater is pretty spectacular.
John Lennon performing separately from the Beatles was probably the musical highlight of the show for me. While obviously in the throes of a serious depression personally, as a performer once on stage Lennon is charisma spilling out all over the place. The depression does show up in the name he chose for his ad hoc group- The Dirty Mac. The name characterizes the general depression and malaise of the whole show. Lennon’s group brought together some stellar lights of the time. Besides himself he had Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums, Eric Clapton on lead guitar and Keith on rhythm. They are joined a by fiddler, I presume Ivry Gitlis, and the irrepressible Yoko Ono.
The Dirty Mac
Yoko was in her Bagism phase. While the movie is loosely shot during Lennon’s gig, if you watch the lower right corner of the film you can see a black object sort of pulsing. That’s the bag Yoko is in. I suppose as she was a performance artist the bag was Yoko’s joke- that’s the bag I’m in, get it?
After a noisy rendition of Yer Blues Yoko wiggles out of the bag bouncing up with her arms outstretched as in Here I am, aren’t I wonderful? Well, she certainly shocked Ivry when she began to squeal. Yoko is very tiny so Ivry kind of looks down at Yoko with raised eyebrows, looks over at John, backs up a couple steps, stops playing momentarily and has this incredulous am I believing what I’m seeing and hearing look on his face. One might say Yoko stole the show. Really, I had to start laughing.
Marianne: I have since learned that Marianne’s performance was deleted. Jody Klein substituted this picture from a French performance. It has nothing to do with the Circus.
The real show stopper comes next when the camera shifts to Marianne Faithfull. She was decorously posed in a stunning black designer gown. At her most beautiful with a fine folky voice that entrancingly recalled her As Tears Go By but strong and more focused. I missed the words but caught the mood of this enchanting chanteuse. Marianne definitely trumped Yoko as a showstopper.
Taj Mahal was a special case. Believe it or not Taj is still out there challenging the Interminable Tourist Dylan himself. Taj works, or did, about 170 days a year, every year. While he is not well known he began as a duo with Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons then added a string of records on his own. The guitarist is Jesse Ed Davis, a failed guitar god, who had a couple solo Lps of his own. Taj’s first two records are superb blues Lps, two of my favorites of the period. The third LP, a two record set is also quite good but begins his political period that obviated his musical career. He goes rapidly down hill after that.
For some reason he chose a rather lame piece from his repertoire. If he was making an appeal for a girl or girls to join him backstage his salacious version of Hey, Little School Girl might have served him better.
The Stones rounded out the show at the end. While the Who were supposed to have buried the Stones I didn’t find it so. The tension had been well maintained throughout the show with the comic interlude of Yoko and the Stones maintained it through to the end with a climax of sorts.
The Who
It was obvious that Mick, Keith and Marianne were in a world of hurt….and Brian Jones. That tragedy would play out over the next year when Brian drowned and Marianne almost drowned in her own tears and Mick spawned a real live Satan at Altamont.
The movie ended in hurt and Satanism- homage to the Devil.
Mick and Marianne had gone to see Jimi Hendrix a few months earlier. After performing Hendrix had sat at Marianne and Mick’s table where he put the make on Marianne telling her to dump the White dude and go with him. Marianne hesitated a moment too long giving Mick offense so that he commemorated the evening in his song, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Suddenly I realized the meaning of the line, you and your friend Jimi as Mick shouted it to someone off stage to the right. OK, not my problem.
So Jagger was still wearing his hair as he did in the movie Performance. That soul corrupting film was obviously still influencing him. As Marianne said, it changed his personality.
The show closed with Sympathy For The Devil. There was a little stage extension on which Mick prostrated himself as though doing obeisance as the song played. It looked like he was groveling, then he looked up making a couple goofy grimaces at the camera beginning to pull off his shirt. Not necessary, Mick, not necessary. Then with the shirt off he straightened to a kneeling position to reveal Satanic tattoos a la Kenneth Anger.
Anger had a large LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Here Mick seemed to be imitating him apparently trying to tell us that the Great Satan had arrived. I hope they were transfers. Interesting, especially as the movie Rosemary’s Baby appeared in 1968 in which Rosemary gives birth to the Son of Satan. Even more interestingly in the 1990’s book sequel Son Of Rosemary Satan’s little lad was named Andy. After Andy Warhol, I presume.
I suppose then that Mick conceived the film as a coming out party for himself as The Great Beast. Apparently he took his Satanism very seriously. It make one wonder, was Altamont a projection of the Great Satan?
Henry Ford And The Jews 3
August 2, 2014
Henry Ford And The Jews
Remembering The Amalekites
Breitman, Richard and Lichtman, Allan J.: FDR And The Jews, 2013, Belknap Harvard
To quote, p. 184:
Theodore N. Kaufman
In early 1941, Theodore N, Kaufman, the Jewish proprietor of a small advertising firm in Newark, New Jersey, self-published a small book that called for sterilizing all German men and women, [NB: this is a plan for the genocide of the German people.] and dividing up Germany among neighboring states. [Thus completely erasing Germany from the face of the earth.] An alert corps of Nazi propagandists saw in Kaufman and his book the perfect foil for myth making. They transformed this obscure self-publisher into the precedent of a bogus “American Peace Federation”, a leader of ‘international Jewry,” and a close associate of Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s speechwriter and confidant. On July 24, 1941 the headline of a front-page story in the central Nazi newspaper, the Volkisch Beobachter, blared: A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan: Roosevelt’s Guidelines.” The story claimed that President Roosevelt had inspired Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish, and personally dictated key sections. Two months later the Nazi propaganda ministry published a pamphlet that cited Kaufman’s book as proof of an international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the German people, abetted by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It said that Germany faced a stark choice with an obvious answer: “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?”
This is a very interesting paragraph from B&L’s very interesting book. While trueish on the face of it, it does distort the reality. It is interesting that Kaufman came from Newark as did our time’s own Philip Roth with his book, The Plot Against America. Roth of course repeated Kaufman’s themes in his book. Newark’s Jewish colony seems to have been quite insular incubating strange notions about Jews and Whites.
As to the absurdity of Kaufman’s insignificance and his possible collaboration with, if not Roosevelt’s administration at least, elements within it, possibly including his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, it may be more plausible than B&L’s coyly laughing it off. Kaufman’s ‘Germany Must Perish’ closely resembles Morgenthau’s post-war plans for Germany which may be a total coincidence, of course. Nevertheless there it is.
While Kaufman may have been an obscure nutter he appears to have been fronting for some not so obscure people. Contrary to B&L’s assertion that the Germans ‘transformed this obscure self-publisher into the president of a bogus “American Peace Federation”‘, it appears that Kaufman, a criminal, who was arrested along with his father for robbery in 1934, in 1939 did form an American Peace Federation. In the same year he argued in a pamphlet against American interventionism. The pamphlet contained this remarkable passage:
A possible plan to Congress…Have us all sterilized….If you plan on sending us to a foreign war, spare us any possibility of ever bringing children into the world- into this country of ours.
By 1941 apparently having re-considered ‘our’ being sterilized he transferred his anxiety to the Germans. Nor was his book Germany Must Perish a futile self-publishing effort. Several newspapers reviewed it in their columns as well as the pre-eminent national news magazine the mighty Time of Henry Luce itself. Nor was the review unfavorable. If the Germans picked up on Kaufman’s book it was most likely because of the Time review, which once again, was not unfavorable or condemnatory.
Time’s review must have been encouraged from someone from within the administration, possibly Rosenman as the Beobachter suggests, or Henry Morgenthau. It is not impossible then that the Beobachter was correct in suggesting that FDR himself had an interest in the project, or in suggesting that Rosenman was involved. After all Nazi spies were said to be in the administration, not that any have been identified by name.
As is absolutely clear, in 1941 Kaufman was demanding the extermination of the German people as well as the effacement of Germany from the Earth.
Is the Beobachter’s claim then that there was an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ to exterminate the German people as ridiculous as B&L suggest?
The Beobachter posed the question: “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?” If that was the choice then in the so-called holocaust the Germans employed the favorite Jewish device of the pre-emptive strike and therefore are guilty merely of getting the first lick in, in a war that was begun in 1933 when the Jews declared war on them and then through Kaufman announcing a plan to exterminate Germans. Why wouldn’t the Germans kill the Jews first? Where is the injustice in that?
Of course, the Jews lacked a military arm of their own so it was necessary for them to find someone big enough to knock the Nazi bully down for them. In this instance they chose Roosevelt and the US. Now, the Jew Irving Berlin chose at this time to introduce his song God Bless America in which he adjures his Jews to ‘stand beside her [America] and guide her’. What is Irving Berlin talking about? He’s talking about the same thing: Germany Must Perish and the US is going to do the dirty work guided by the Jews.
Noel Ignatiev- Harvard Genocidist
Now, moving ahead to the present. The Jewish program as proclaimed by the ‘nutter’ Noel Ingnatiev, at the time a full professor at Harvard University, is that ‘Whiteness’ must be eliminated from the earth. So, moving from Germans to all White people the Jews are calling for the genocide of all Whites. Once again, they haven’t the population to do this while to act would destroy their credibility and possibly, although I doubt it, bring destruction of the Hitler kind down on their heads. For the task of destroying ‘Whiteness’ they have enlisted the Negro population of the US as their shock troops. Although the paramilitary actions of Negroes against Whites are suppressed by the media which are owned by the Jews daily paramilitary actions are being carried out somewhere in the US.
Thus, from the Wilson administration to the present the Jews have followed a carefully orchestrated program of destruction of Whites as Henry Ford indicated in his articles of the International Dearborn Independent. You can see why the Jews wanted Ford destroyed. If he had gone on from strength to strength rather than being emasculated the course of history might have been very different. Stand by Henry Ford.
The Sixties And The Negro Revolution
Part 3a
Terraplaning Through The Ozone
by
R.E. Prindle
Always keep in mind 1954’s Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education of Topeka as the basis of our interpretation of the Negro revolution. There are other things to consider. In that era before the internet, indeed, even as television networks were only developing, magazines were a key element in forming public opinion. Liberalism, even Communism, was the lens through which events were viewed. This was usually disguised as tongue in cheek conservative criticism.
The most important purveyors of this sort of public opinion were Time, Newsweek and Life. The first and last formed the Time-Life group of magazines all of which were very influential while disguising their Liberal bias very well. Life was the first to bite the dust probably being replaced by T-L’s People Magazine that more or less covered the same ground in a more contemporary fashion. Far back but vying with these was the William F. Buckley fronted National Review. Buckley was the most pernicious of all posing as the consummate Conservative while guarding the Liberal agenda from Conservative inroads.
These were New York based magazines so that it is not surprising perhaps that they were staffed mainly by Jews, including the National Review, hence Left Wing although disguised as right wing or objective, and heavily pro-Israel, Negro and definitely Jewish. It might seem odd that all pushed a Jewish agenda but then as New York City was 25% Jewish let’s just say they had a foot in the door.
Until Time-Life was absorbed by the Jews in the TL-Warner Bros. merger the Luces, Henry and Claire Booth who founded the empire ran a fairly useful organization. I read Time religiously and believed in the veracity of the magazine until I learned in their account of Howard Hughes departure from Las Vegas that they fabricated the story completely. Pure fiction and that this was done routinely.
Nevertheless as publishers of outstanding illustrated history books in extended series and phonograph record collections of very high quality they did their best to educate Americans of their past.
I finally chucked Time Life in after buying their mail order library, The Time-Life Reading Program. This was a series of 108 titles sent four volumes bi-monthly. They became progressively Red oriented, that is propagandistic. I read the first eighty or so titles then stopped although I have the full set of 108 less the replacement title of one volume.
As they were located in New York City they were enablers of the various revolutions giving national prominence to what were local situations. Andy Warhol would have remained a relative unknown except for Time while a relative nobody like Edie Sedgwick went nationwide with Life’s picture essay of her. Even Ed Sanders of the Fugs made the cover of Life as T-L constantly hyped the Greenwich Village Bohemian culture, enabling that culture to conquer America.
Newsweek was a Time wannabe that didn’t have what it took. One picked it up when Time wasn’t around which was rarely. Newsweek has gone defunct while pursuing a far left Jewish agenda. The signs are that Time sabotaged by the Jews through their merger will probably soon follow under Jewish editorship.
As commentary magazines there were Harpers, Atlantic, The Reporter and a host of others but they were minor in distribution compared to the giants Time, Life and Newsweek.
Time is of the essence of the period.
Movies and TV
Just as one’s dreams form a parallel reality alongside one’s waking life so movies and TV play a key role in the formation of one’s public life somewhere between dreams and waking reality. Contrary to claims made by the industry movies were not about entertainment but were purely propaganda disguised as entertainment. No serious history or study of movies exists to my knowledge although specific movies are being injected into articles as alternate reality. While movies may not be actually real they nevertheless create real memories and very influential memories that do affect your actions. And memory is the basis of consciousness. The memories are so powerful that one may adjust one’s personality to reflect what is on the screen. Thus when M.A.S.H. was on TV any number of Hawkeyes stalked the land assuming that persona. The Hawkeyes then cast the people around them in the various roles behaving as if those roles were real in fact. What a curse that was.
There was a changing of the guard that occurred in 1962. Within a few days of each other two movies were released the one being The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the other Ian Fleming’ Dr. No. The former was the swan song of the old American mores while the latter established the new Freudian/Reichian pornographic image of the New America.
Liberty Valance featured the two aging stars of the thirties and forties John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart while being directed by the old warhorse, John Ford. Dr. No introduced Wayne’s successor Sean Connery. It was like Zeus replacing Cronus in the Age change from Taurus to Aries.
The two female leads also heralded the change. Vera Miles as the beautiful Hallie Stoddard Aryan model of Chivalry of virgin sensibilities exited stage right while like Aphrodite of old the new model woman Ursula Andress rose nearly nude from the sea as the pornographer’s delight. Indeed, soon an area legal for pornography would be created within a twenty mile radius of the Hollywood studios ensuring that pornography would triumph in America’s theatres.
Thus violence was personated in the form of James Bond (Sean Connery) and pornography in various forms of Bond heroines who might all have been named Pussy Galore were united. The future was cast. Out with the chaste and demure Vera Miles and in with the lusty, busty, big-assed Bond heroines chasing the Big Dick. I knew something had happened but I was left scratching my head.
Nineteen sixty-two also produced the morally relativist masterpiece Mondo Cane. The movie had tremendous impact as it demonstrated that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Sixty years later its images flash through my mind
Thus the Jews through Freudian/Reichian psychoanalysis triumphed over and displaced Aryan European Chivalric mores.
Now, Freud and Reich were motivated by Freud’s total misunderstanding of the Unconscious. Freud looked inside himself and extrapolated his malaise as the normal for mankind irrespective of race or religion. If Freud was the Jesus of psychoanalysis then his disciple Wilhelm Reich was its St. Paul. While Freud was rejected by Aryans Reich was able to translate sex and violence into something palatable for them.
While most people know Freud, at least by name, many fewer have heard of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was a disciple of Freud. While Freud dressed his discovery of the psycho-analytic method in a lot of mumbo-jumbo he essentially deified his own subconscious desires for sex and violence and passed them off as universal. He didn’t take those desires to their logical conclusion however while Reich did. Reich’s vision was pure sado-masochistic sex and violence and by sex I mean merely fucking.
While this had been what Freud meant, when Reich held up his mirror for Freud to see Freud was revolted by himself and cast Reich from his organization. At that time his group was all Jewish as it was realized that psycho-analysis was a Jewish affair.
Reich continued on and wed Communist violence to his psycho-sexual political creation. Where he would have gone from there having been discredited by the psycho-analysts isn’t clear but that scourge who destroyed America without lifting a finger, Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany. The German States were the center of the psycho-sexual scum.
As Hitler was antagonistic to Jews in general, when he came to power in 1933 all this intellectual treyfe with the exception of Freud, and he was to plague England, fled to the United States settling in its two culture forming centers, New York City and Los Angeles. Reich, the King of Scurf, was one of these figures. Hitler’s revenge on the United States. He remained on the East Coast peddling his sex and violence.
If Freud had rejected Reich US authorities followed suit in spades. They were so repelled by Reichian theories that, this is truly remarkable, they not only arrested him as a criminal lunatic throwing him into prison but actually collected his books and burned them. This was in anything goes America too.
The only thing other than Reich that the US was intolerant of was Jewish comic books that were also banned. The Jewish Horror comics such as William Gaines Tales From The Crypt were sado-masochistic, violent and pornographic while possible inspired by Reich’s approach to psycho-analysis.
I was an avid reader from eight to twelve of all the Gaines comics which I considered outre and even as I read them thought to myself that they shouldn’t allow them for little kids like myself. But, I read them eagerly. Still I didn’t know that what I was reading was sado-pornographic stuff. Didn’t know either term at the time. Apparently our parents did. These were vivid, vivid stories. Great pictures. Many of the images linger on. Perhaps I was revolted because I have always rejected pornography as a mental malaise. Not that that does me or anyone else any good because every Hollywood movie has a pornographic base while many for general distribution are worse than anything Gaines published. His line was named, humorously I hope, EC- Educational Comics. Believe it or not.
At any rate not all Reich’s books were burned as they were revived in the Sixties forming the basis of Bohemian sex and politics notions. So a new synthesis began to form, began to jell in the Sixties. The adoption of a new set of mores. It was realized that movies were an unrivalled propagandistic tool.
Dusan Makajevic, a Yugoslavian film maker made a perfect visualization of Freudian/Reichian sexual politics in his movie of 1971: WR: Mysteries Of The Organism. The modern world in a nut shell, no pun intended I don’t recommend it as without proper education its sexual presentation will certainly be misunderstood as pure pornography. Of course it is, but only as a visualization of the Freudian/Reichian unconscious and its consequences. E. Michael Jones gives an extended literary version in his Libido Dominandi that I do recommend. Perhaps read it first.
So, now, we have the perfect propagandistic tool that functions through both the conscious and unconscious minds in hands of Jews indoctrinated in Freudian/Reichian psychology. After WWII and the discovery of Hitler’s death camps the Jews became absolutely hysterical. Even though American Jews had never been in any danger, not even remotely, they now saw White Americans as potential if not actual Fascists intent on destroying them. This was serious.
William Paley of CBS, himself a Jew, believed American death camps were so imminent that he capitalized the careers of prominent Jewish performers- actors, comedians and such- and sold shares in their future incomes to gentiles. By this ploy he believed that when the round up came these few Jews would be spared for economic reasons. This is serious, indeed.
In any event the path to survival in their mental state was to divide and discombobulate. The Negro as a tool was at hand. While the Judaeo-Communists of the twenties and thirties had always used the Negro to sow discord and confusion, in the post-war US their effort was stepped up. The movies were the perfect vehicle to divide and control America. Hence we had all those horrid Sidney Poitier movies shaming Whites and glorifying Negroes. By 1960 this was nearly in full spate. Miscegenation was a popular device so there were numerous Negro male/White female pairings. Remember the movies are a third reality somewhere between waking and dreaming providing both conscious and unconscious very real memories from faked reality. What was seen wasn’t true but was accepted as such by suggestion. This is serious business while presented as entertainment, it was actually behavior changing propaganda. New mores for the masses.
The dialogue, then, was controlled and directed through films, the third reality.
And then there was Brown vs the BOE. The greatest divisive decision ever made and taken full advantage of by the Jews. Here was a way to protect themselves from a nation, they thought, of Hitlers thirsting for Jewish blood. After the great preliminary battles of the Fifties came the Sixties and the wedge that split the nation- the Civil Rights Battle.
The Sixties And The Negro Revolution
Part II
by
R.E. Prindle
Terror Over The San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Side Of Bay Bridge
It was back in’59 of the old century that I was discharged from the US Navy at Treasure Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Thus my adult life began as the Sixties dawned. Who knew? It was a terrifying period for me.
Treasure Island After The Warships Had Left
I was to take up residence in Oakland the crown jewel, so to speak, of the East Bay. In the three years I had been gone, that is in the cocoon of the Navy, the country had not so much changed as advanced very rapidly. I was more than slightly out of touch. The country was on the cusp of a gigantic leap in scale. I wasn’t.
Without myself, or as I think, anyone else realizing it, or using the term, the Negro Revolution was in full swing.
As Charles De Gaulle, the President of France, once noted: The US while being a White country acted as a colored country. Thus the US knowingly and purposely sabotaged European relationships with the colored or, as it was known, The Third World. The vast majority of the US was in favor of this course being of a sanctimonious nature feeling quite superior to the evil Europeans. I was opposed to it, I liked the way the maps were colored. But, I was very nearly in a minority of one.
Thus, however, when the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya erupted the US sympathized with the black Africans. When Ho Chi Minh defeated the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu a year later most Americans believed justice had been served on the evil Europeans. None of us knew at the time that those howitzers bombarding the FFL were not provided by the USSR; they were of US manufacture shipped to Hanoi from Okinawa when they were not needed for the conquest of Japan. Unknowingly the French were fighting both the Reds and the US.
Negro revolutionists in the US were turned loose in 1954 when the Supreme Court subverted American freedom by beginning compulsory integration of the races with the Brown vs. The Board Of Education of Topeka decision. The hounds of war were loosed. All hell broke loose in Alabama as the famous and mourned Bull Connor began his legendary career of opposition.
Abetting the Negro revolution in the US, in 1957 the African State of Ghana was granted its independence by the withdrawal of Great Britain and then beginning in 1960 colony after colony was made independent until the former virtual colony of Europe was a congeries of African States filled with warring tribes. I, so far as I know, alone viewed this with great sadness. The great Quest for the Source of the Nile as detailed in Alan Moorehead’s great work The White Nile also published in 1960 had ended in disaster. The nature and extent of the disaster wouldn’t be realized until the Africans began the invasion of Europe shortly thereafter.
But I was just taking the first baby steps leading to the rest of my life. Even if I had been knowledgeable of the contending forces I would have been a drop in the illimitable ocean. Still, as my own entity, I considered myself the center of the universe. I considered the planet the center of the universe, indeed, the only part of the universe that counted. What effect could the light emitted by stars from a billion years in the past, the source of which might even no longer exist, have on me or my home on Earth? None. I and it were where it was at.
So there I was a small lone figure, a stranger in the strange land of California, the Fool of the Tarot deck, taking the first step to begin my journey of a thousand miles.
Although from Michigan I had always considered San Francisco my spiritual home especially the San Francisco Bay Area and now I would become intimate with it in its entirety and even most of Northern California from Bakersfield to Redding.
Mt. Diablo
The Bay is an immense thing stretching from Sacramento and Stockton down to Santa Clara County, San Jose and what has become known as Silicon Valley. It is like a great wound separating the communities that border it North and South and East and West. In the attempt do bind it into a unit great sutures known as bridges crossed the vast waters, the Bay Bridge is eight miles long, to make the various communities into one.
Even a great tunnel beneath the waters called the BART- Bay Area Rapid Transit- would be drilled beneath the bay. A truly astonishing achievement among such astonishing achievements as the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay Bridges.
Further to the South the equally amazing but built over shallow water is the San Mateo Bridge and below that the rather commonplace Dumbarton Bridge. To the North above the Bay Bridge is the major construction of the San Rafael Bridge and above that the Carquinez Straights bridge. In the Sixties all these bridges were readily passable without long waits or even waits.
For now the story is of Oakland. Henry J. Kaiser one of America’s great industrialists, ran his shipyards there where the so-called Liberty ships were built. Sixteen million White men were impressed into the wars of the ‘40s. They were all removed from their jobs into their uniforms. From this distance I doubt that sixteen million men were needed at one time, but they were taken leaving behind the women and Negroes. The Negroes were in the South so they were entrained to the factories of the North. This is called the Great Migration.
After the wars were over and the White men returned wanting their jobs back the Negroes kept coming North and West. However the returning Whites were now competing for the jobs with the Negroes who hadn’t been there when they left. Then in ’54 came the criminal Brown decision. The Negroes had been living the high life during the war enjoying wages that could never have imagined while the Whites were getting their asses shot off around the world.
The Negroes kept coming although there were no longer enough jobs for both veterans and themselves. During the fifties and sixties thousands per month arrived in the Bay Area transforming it into a different peoplescape, especially Oakland. There was a strict segregation.
Oakland is divided East and West by the great street of East 13th. That street runs from the Bay all the way through Oakland and the adjoining cities of San Leandro and Hayward all the way through Niles and Warm Springs, then independent towns to the Nimitz Freeway where the five towns were incorporated into a city called Fremont. Fifty miles or so.
In Oakland it was determined that the west of East 13th, West Oakland, would be abandoned to the Negroes. Now, West Oakland had a history dating back to the founding of Oakland. It was a fine neighborhood. It had been home to some families for a hundred years. This was an established area. No matter.
As the Negroes came in their in their thousands and tens of thousands the Whites were just moved out, a block or two a month. The rudely displaced Whites, I mean this was a sight to see, had to have a place to live so huge apartment buildings and great housing developments beyond the San Leandro border into Hayward and over into Contra Costa County popped up like mushrooms in Springtime. Orchards and farmland disappeared beneath concrete.
Contra Costa (Against the Coast) County just East of Alameda County and its Oakland was a barren desert irrigated into immense fruit and nut orchards. Truly a desert had been made to bloom.
These orchards were uprooted and piled along the roads as bulldozers moved in to clear the land for the houses that would populate that huge desert. Thus an undesirable social situation was created as tens of thousands Southern socially crude Negroes displaced tens of thousands of Whites who had to form new communities and associations. Everyone was unhappy and it showed. Tensions were unbearable. A great depression settled over the entire Bay Area from Sacramento to San Jose and all the Peninsula below San Francisco and the East Bay. It was fairly congenial to me as I was suffering from a childhood induced depression myself. It was pretty pathetic though.
Oakland was in turmoil. It had always been a rough town. If you want a nice portrayal of its early days check out Jack London’s Valley Of The Moon, a very nice near memoir. So anyway, you had his tremendous influx of really raw material, the rawest, displacing almost overnight the whole of West Oakland.
I’m not being critical but as people these Negroes were completely out of touch with a modern technological world and when I say out of touch I mean neither myself or any White I knew had any idea of why things were happening or even what was happening that’s how out of touch they were.
What I write is a matter of placing in context what I study compared with what I remember. Some things, like Freudian motifs, I dimly perceived then, the Mafia presence of course was or should have been obvious to everyone except J. Edgar Hoover but I couldn’t tell you the first time I heard he CIA mentioned and I had no idea what the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were doing. The Foundations one discovers were instrumental in many social situations.
The West Side that the Negroes appropriated was a very nice area in a modest way, very desirable tree lined streets. It was not a slum when the Negroes arrived. Being a flat level naturally air conditioned apron of the Bay the displaced were indeed unhappy being translated to the desert of Contra Costa. Only the Negroes could disparage West Oakland as ‘the Flatlands.’
Huey Graduated High School And Attended OCC Without Knowing How To Read
The Negroes had no social graces or knowledge of what they called ‘the White Man’s law.’ What was to them natural behavior was condemned by the White Man’s law. By the time I began showing up in Oakland in the late fifties they were threatening 98th Street, the boundary between Oakland and San Leandro. The latter city had a Sundown law or custom, at least. Temporarily at least the Negroes couldn’t advance beyond 98th.
In the meantime the behavior that was criminal according to White Man’s law but normal to the Negro mind multiplied to the detriment of the White population exponentially plus. No exact accounting is possible but take the situation at Oakland’s Castlemont High School as an example. Castlemont was out on the cusp of the eighties and nineties. The Negro invasion was in the seventies crossing over into the eighties in ’58 when I spent my liberty time in Oakland. Castlemont was half White at the time and wholly hell for that half.
The Negroes were in beat down and rape mode all the time. The White students got no sympathy from the community, they were on their own while any fights the boys had to get involved in were always charged to them while the guilty Negroes were exonerated. The rapes of the girls were either disregarded or unreported. They just expected it.
It was absolutely essential for them to clear the school directly after the last bell. Negro boys roamed the halls looking for the tardy girl. I knew a girl from Castlemont and witnessed the situation. It was shameful, even criminal, what those parents made their children endure. I have often wondered what happened to some of them.
As for the disorder cast into the lives of the Whites who had been forcefully evicted from homes of perhaps two or three generations it was astonishing to see and also hazardous for them as they all fought for a shred of old self-esteem and standing. Many lives were destroyed, but, we all had to survive. As the chef says, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Some chose rough behavior while serial murders began in earnest probably being more common than recognized. Those were taut times in the Bay Area. You had to watch your step and it got progressively worse. About ’63 and into ’64 before I entered college full time I had a job with a mortgage banking firm, Lowell, Smith and Evers. It was there I learned every square inch of Northern California, except Contra Costa County. When I started the territory was divided equally but I eventually did all the work except for Contra Costa because my senior partner, I forget his name, call him Dale, always retained CC for himself. Perhaps the extreme depression suited his mental state. What with all the population transfers CC was a fairly rough place, everyone suspicious of the other. I learned enough about rough places myself so Dale could have CC and welcome to it.
Located in Contra Costa is Mount Diablo- Devil Mountain. Dale trained me in CC. Dale was a graduate of Stanford University over on the Peninsula. I forget his major but it had no commercial value so that upon graduation the only job he could get was selling coffee to grocery stores in Chicago. Thus he, a graduate of Stanford University, had to deal with store managers who at best were high school graduates as equals. It was more than he could bear. He couldn’t handle the differential in expectations. He quit Chicago and came back to the Bay Area.
Our job was not a quality job, it barely kept us in the white collar class. I never could understand why he accepted it. He still worked with high school graduates like myself but even though we were equals he could consider himself the senior member. This still left him very bitter. His was a desperate situation. I still had he college option.
Although declassed or perhaps because of it he lived near the UC Berkeley campus where he dropped a tab of acid every day before he left to work CC. Berkley had an LSD experimental lab so Dale was well supplied. On the first day he offered me a tab but I declined. For lunch break that day as every day of training we got a sandwich and he drove half way up Mt. Diablo to a magnificent lookout spot. Work was just leisure for Dale so these were two, three, four hour lunches where he would let his acid drenched mind rove through he stars. He delivered some magnificent raps that were thoroughly engrossing. I mention this in detail because the Zodiac killer began his depredations four years later in 1968. Zodiac also had some very cosmic thoughts centered on Mont Diablo not too different from Dale’s. I have often wondered if Dale was Zodiac.
By 1964 when Dale and I sat on Mt. Diablo I’d been taking night classes from three different Junior Colleges- Merritt Campus of OCC- Oakland Community College-, Marin Jr. College, and Chabot Jr. College in Hayward. Fall term of ’64 I quit Lowell, Smith and Evers and entered California State College at Hayward- now styled California State University East Bay- full time.
OCC was an old high school on the Oakland-Berkeley border so it had a special character, Oakland with a Berkeley flavor. Of course ’60 to ’62 when I attended was pre-hippie so there was a different psychology but the flux and change of demographics had its own special quality.
As I said, the Bay Area was in turmoil. If you had a taste for it it was quite wonderful. There was a change from the culture of the old San Francisco of the thirties through the fifties in which the DJ Don Sherwood who was on the way out had been representative and the transition into the sixties of Herb Caen and LSD, rock and roll and the Black Panthers. I began OCC at the same time Huey Newton did. Our paths did cross one time. The Neo-Abolitionist Whites had seized Oakland City College. They were ardent practitioners of Columbia University’s Eric Foner’s Unfinished Revolution. They were there to finish it so we were part of the continuation of Reconstruction. Phase two. The forces of evil were on the march.
In the course of my college career I attended the previously mentioned Jr. Colleges plus Cal State, and grad school at UC Berkeley and UOregon. While all the schools were Liberal none was involved in the Negro Revolution and Reconstruction like OCC.
In addition the Homosexual Revolution was in full bloom in the Bay Area while the faculty at OCC was heavily if not morally infected. This would involve an additional twist of fate for me. The whole Liberal Coalition was composed of justified sinners who considered themselves above the law, vigilantes in effect.
The Neo-Abolitionists who actually believed they were continuing Reconstruction against the Rebels now styled us as ‘racists’ were intent on exterminating us as they had been the Southerners. The homosexuals as a semi-secret society were at war with we heterosexuals. By 1969 and the Stonewall Riots in NYC they actually won a major battle and took possession of the field. Identifying themselves with law and virtue they felt no compunction at committing crimes they could conceal. As Voltaire advised his followers: strike but conceal your hand.
Faculty pressure was put on students to compel them to adopt Neo-Abolitionist attitudes, rigged so-called debates and really if one were vocal, expulsion. For some reason the NeoAs seemed to believe that no one had experience with homosexuals and Negroes even though Oakland’s high schools were actual rape factories and war zones. Affirmative Action was the order of the day that is, egregious crimes against Whites.
In my own instance I sat in class next to this forty some year old Negro. In passing back test papers we had taken I noticed that this Negro had gotten a B while I had received a C. But then I noticed that he had a score of 64 while I had a 76. Thinking that the homosexual teacher had made an error I pointed out the incongruity of scores and grades. The teacher sneered at me telling me that it was time for Negroes to get a few advantages to redress old grievances.
I can’t believe I was picked out to be the recipient of this ‘social justice’ so I presume the teacher was indulging himself in random acts of criminality. In the event there was no remedy for this crime so I was somewhat dazed and bewildered not able to understand what was happening. Discrimination of this kind was going on constantly.
There appeared to be agents or spies attempting to trap the unwary into making comments that could be interpreted as ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’ although those terms were not yet in use. Once identified, as I look back, it seems clear that spies or agents tried to discredit any so identified. A homosexual trick was to inject themselves into conversations then correct the pronunciation of the victim trying to make him look ignorant.
This notion was probably patterned on the tricks of John F. Kennedy who was running for president at this time which was 1960. Anyone who noticed that Kennedy was an Irish Catholic was shouted down as a bigot yet the 1960 election was a transfer of power from the Anglo-Saxons to the Celts and from Protestants to Catholics while the Kennedys- Jack, Bobby and Teddy- passionately embraced the Negro side of the race war. Teddy in 1965 would be instrumental in changing the immigration act which would allow Africans and West Indians to immigrate to the US. Most people either discounted the Irish Catholic background of the Kennedys or were shamed into silence but Kennedy’s Celtic and Catholic background would be an element in his assassination three years later.
The Kennedys’ election triumph was a major change of direction for the country. Had Jack not been assassinated it is probable that a Jack, Bobby, Teddy succession amounting to twenty-four years of Irish Catholic rule would have guaranteed a significant if not total shift in mores not unlike the current Clinton-Bush-Obama succession. It was not for nothing that Jack’s presidency was styled Camelot after the Celtic King Arthur of Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
As if to characterize the change as a break Jack began to change the pronunciation of words. Thus mobile always pronounced as mobul became mo-bile to the approval of the press corps. In subsequent years whole dictionaries would change regularly to keep people on edge. Wholesale name changes from Peking to Beijing and Bombay to Mumbai would take place.
In seeming keeping with Jack’s linguistic gymnastics as I was talking to a couple people an aggressive homo came over. I was talking about the movie producer Elia Kazan. As in his movie America America in which he introduced himself as Eel-ya. I used that pronunciation.
The homo contradicted me. You could have seen the loss of credibility on the faces of my listeners. I countered with a request for the correct pronunciation to which the homo offered E-lie-a. I of course offered Elia’s own pronunciation from the movie that, fortunately, the others had seen so turning that charge back. The psychological warfare went on as continually as the racial warfare but unrecognized as such.
Coming from the cocoon of the Navy I wasn’t aware of the changes taking place while I was away. They occurred at work as well as at school. In 1961 I was employed by the trucking firm P.I.E.- Pacific Inter-Mountain Express- since defunct. I had worked my way up to entry office job suffering fair humiliation in the process. One had to actually beg to get one. And entry level was as a mail boy. Once there an opening occurred at the Commission Agency Desk for which I applied and my mailroom supervisor as a favor allowed me to take the job with many admonitions to watch my step.
I had been at the desk for a few months when it was announced that we would be employing a Negro, we were all White to that point. The Negro had been recruited. He had no training or experience. He was to given a grade 4 pay rate. I was a 3 while 4s were rare.
I had been working full time while attending night school. As noted when I applied I had to beg my way into a mailboy job. As a boon I had been granted the grade 3 job at the Commission Agency Desk. Let us say that I had felt the whip on my back.
Now this unprepared Negro was being given for free a grade 4 as Affirmative Action which was a term not yet heard and management knew the guy wasn’t capable of doing the work. They proposed that I take the desk next to his which was also a grade 4 and do that work as well as his for him. Thus I would be doing two grade 4 jobs, and grade 4s were fairly complex, for the pay of one. I would have done it for a grade 5 but they were too cheap. They’d rather pay a Negro for nothing than add a dime an hour to my paycheck. C’est la vie.
The guy came to work but had no interest in learning to do his job. He soon drifted up to a cluster of desks handled by several attractive young girls where he spent his days romancing them. For some unknown reason he was soon gone. Perhaps he quit unable to endure the burden of having to be anyplace let alone at a consistent 8:30 in the morning.
Unable to endure such social injustice I quit. I had no further encounters with Negroes in either jobs or other educational institutions until the early seventies.
That doesn’t mean the Negro revolution didn’t continue to develop in the Bay Area as well as the curious White attitude toward Reconstruction.
In 1966 the rapist ‘with intent to murder,’ Eldridge Cleaver was released from prison due to the efforts of several Jewish women. He had served only eight years having been incarcerated in 1958. He was very far from reformed, that is, he was still in paramilitary mode.
Cleaver, as a Negro, was a vicious person. He said he developed his raping skills on the West side of East Thirteenth then crossed over to hunt the big game, White women. While rape may be a crime by White Man’s law as the Negro thought of it assaults against White people or their property were acts of war therefor laudable and not reprehensible. Only White thickness prevents their seeing the difference in point of view. Thus all Negroes can be seen as paramilitary troops.
While Cleaver’s crimes are heinous enough the attitude spread to Whites. Since 1954 and the criminal BOE decision there had been a steady deterioration of manners and attitudes toward crime among Whites. White criminals, or revolutionaries in their term, raised the slogan of expropriating the expropriators which led to wholesale theft and crimes of violence on an ideological basis.
The adoption of Negro manners by an increasing White minority led to the corruption of the entire White generation. One learned rudeness in self-defense. I altered my behavior in order to compete beginning in 1961. This was all the result of the Board Of Education decision. A well-meaning but ignorant folly.
The Negro attitudes were aided and abetted by Freudian psychology. The White ideal until the Second Reconstruction began, for that is what it is, was the notion self-control and consciousness, the abatement of violent or what Freud would call ‘instinctive’ behavior. He called the suppression of ‘instinctive’ behavior repression.
Freud thought repression was bad for the person and his health. He called for the indulgence of the unconscious or liberating the repressed. During the fifties and sixties the unconscious was increasingly indulged, the abandonment of repression, or more accurately self-control, was embraced while self-control was abandoned. The result was disastrous resulting among other things in the Me generation.
In 1966 then Cleaver was released while at the same time, perhaps not coincidentally, Huey Newton now six years older than when I met him in 1960, formed the Black Panthers. Rather than a new idea the Panthers was a logical development of previous years. In Chicago a paramilitary outfit called The Blackstone Rangers had been formed. Their crimes they, of course, thought of as military operations. Only White Man’s law called them crimes.
In addition a series of Negro insurgencies, styled riots by Whites, in which cities were severely damaged had taken place in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago and of course the famous Watts explosion of LA in 1965. These insurgencies would be a continuing recurrence all through the sixties especially in the major eruptions of ’67 and ’68 which virtually engulfed the country much like he Tet offensive in Viet Nam. So, Huey’s Black Panthers were just the next logical step.
Cleaver on his release was set on creating his own paramilitary group but opted to join Newton and the Panthers. Newton was not so militant although he was convicted of murdering an Oakland policeman so that a rift developed between the two men. Cleaver did lead an insurgency in West Oakland that resulted in several deaths. The failure of the insurgency led to his famous flight to Algeria. It was then my path crossed with the Negroes once again.
At the time I was attending grad school at UOregon in Eugene where I had opened a record store as the ’66 to ’78 golden age of phonograph records, vinyl, was beginning to take off. Nineteen sixty-eight to seventy-four was a period of constant unbearable turmoil that had to negatively affect the national psyche.
The Hippie emerged in 1966. By 1967 I was one too. Although the Negroes were a privileged group the Hippies weren’t. Restrained in their activities with Negroes the cops turned their fury on we Hippies. All regards for rights and laws were thrown out the window. I fully sympathize with the Negro hatred of the police.
The Black Panthers engaged in all sorts of bogus community projects that were merely extortions and shakedowns. At the same time paramilitary operations continued. The biggest was the confrontation with authorities at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. This was a major battle with the authorities involving the Panthers, the Blackstone Rangers and others.
While slightly beyond the sixties paramilitary operations increased leading through drive by shootings in San Francisco to the Zebra assaults of ’72 and ’73. The stated intent of the Zebra operations was to activate the race war but the ever tolerant Whites refused to play the Negro game preferring to call the assaults ‘crimes’ according to White Man’s law and riots rather than battles according to the law of war.
Hell, even the 9/11 paramilitaries who leveled the Twin Towers killing 3000 or so people while devastating NYC were tried as criminals. Three thousand murders and tens of billions in damages were treated as a light crime. What do you have to do? How thick can the authorities be?
Now, aiding the Negro revolutionaries were the acts of the Jews.
To back up a little bit and blend the Negro Revolution with the Jewish Revolution that was going on at the same time. In the Bay Area at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1966 the Jews fomented the so-called Free Speech Movement. This was double speak for its opposite, the suppression of free speech, the subordination of the university to the Jews
By 1966 the Jews were in control of the university attempting to compel submission to their program. In some zany way they had convinced the mainly upper income White students that they were a privileged class without the merit of earning it. Essentially they claimed the Whites had stolen their places from equally qualified Negroes on the basis of their White skin. I and 60-70% of Whites had no illusions of benefitting from White Skin Privilege. We had worked damn hard to get where we were although it was still not anywhere from nowhere. Yet these absurd masochist upper income White students claimed to represent all White people. It was demanded of all we rest to sacrifice our wellbeing for the benefit of Negroes.
Huey Newton and his Panthers then stepped in to fill this vacuum of self-abnegation.
Now, Jewish women had done the heavy lifting to get the rapist with the intent to murder, Eldridge Cleaver, out of prison. Another very dedicated paramilitary Negro, George Jackson, was also raising hell in prison. Jewish women set to work to free him also. A hysterical female Jewish lawyer representing Jackson somehow even managed to fuck him through or around the barriers then went home and expected her husband to congratulate her.
Your brain spins when you read this stuff with the author relating his story in the same tone as: I went to the grocery store and bought a loaf of bread.
Jackson was smuggled some guns into San Quentin then in total rage tried to blast his way out of the prison. It should come as no surprise that he was killed in the shootout. Angela Davis, of the East Village, then organized the subsequent shootout in the Marin County court room that was truly an insurrectionary act.
While it was clear that Davis was as guilty as Bomber Billy Ayers of the Weather Underground she as he was able to boast ‘Guilty as hell, free as a bird.’ Quite clear that both had somebody watching over them. Someone very, very powerful. Like Ayers she was rewarded with a PhD. He to go on to become a ‘distinguished professor’ at UIllinois while she has an honored position at California’s Red campus UC at Santa Cruz. She probably attended Panther human bar-b-ques out there in the woods. Huey was given his PhD at Santa Cruz also. There are some bennies for being Black.
Negroes have continued to receive favored treatment down to the present when Liberal Whites installed their pet Negro Barack Obama in the White House.
Also outside the scope of the Sixties a man of questionable intelligence, the singer Bob Dylan, put his queer shoulder to the wheel in 1976, the US Bi-Centenary, during his Rolling Thunder tour of the home of the American Revolution, New England. Perhaps Dylan thought he was leading the second American Revolution celebrating the takeover of the country by his Jews. As if to mock the Whites he played the tour in White Face, that is white grease paint.
Hurricane Carter was a Negro boxer who had been convicted of murder once and then a second time on his appeal. Dylan wrote a song called Hurricane Carter in an attempt to generate sympathy for the murderer and free him from prison. Perhaps this was a symbolic repetition of Lincoln freeing the slaves. We’ll probably never know but the song was the focal point of the tour. It did result in the freeing of Carter.
Dylan was rewarded for his courageous defense of Carter when the Negro Obama was elected president. One of his first acts was to summon Dylan and his fellow Red Joan Baez to Washington for a command performance for himself and Michele. Bob responded with his anthem Blowin’ In The Wind. A song that every flatulent person loves.
While I wasn’t aware of it at the time or, at least, didn’t view the situation as a race war, it is clear now that the government’s, by this time of Richard Nixon, duty was to suppress the Negro paramilitaries. Bear in mind that a time we had a race war at home and a foreign war in Viet Nam.
Coming to the Viet Namese’s aid in 1968 the Red Chinese had initiated a cultural invasion and war in the US inciting a type of Civil War. Things were getting pretty hot. To defeat the Negro insurgency a program called Cointelpro was formed. While this agency affected Whites not at all, I never heard of it ‘til years maybe decades later. The Jews defamed and belittled this US effort to quash the Negro revolt as ‘un-American.’ What would they know about it?
By 1970 the Negro, Jewish and Homosexual Revolutions had succeeded. The country was in deep turmoil, nearly anarchy, at home and abroad. Check out movies like Putney Swope, Midnight Cowboy,Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Cruising and a host of others.
While I have never admired Nixon, like Warren G. Harding in 1921 in his suppression of the Communist insurrection, Nixon was able to defuse the situation and return the country to a simulacrum of what Harding called ‘normalcy.’ This was no mean feat although Nixon under the guidance of the Jew Kissinger botched the job.
In 1923 Harding died a mysterious death. While there is no hard evidence as yet that he paid that price for defeating the Red takeover can it be coincidence that Nixon was driven from office for the same offence?
Part 3 broadens and returns to New York.
Part V: Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
February 3, 2014
Part V
Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
by
R.E. Prindle
Henry Ford
Woeste, Victoria Saker: Henry Ford’s War On Jews And The Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, 2012, UStanford Press.
While Miss Woeste’s main concern in her historical polemic seems to be the struggle to stem criticism of Jewish activities otherwise known as ‘hate’ speech one wonders if she has even read any of Henry Ford’s three autobiographies.
Yet in Ford’s first auto, My Life And Work, he clearly lays out what he is doing and why. Miss Woeste incorporates none of this in her polemic or even attempts to analyze Ford’s motives instead belittling and willfully misinterpreting what he does.
The fact is that Ford was one of the top three admired men of America. Nothing built his reputation so much as his doubling the wages of his workmen which made them aristocrats among labor. Actually the increase was more than a doubling for the least skilled laborers at five dollars a day while the more skilled tasks earned commensurately more, six, seven, eight dollars and more. Ford workers then were comparatively much better off than other workers in Detroit and the nation.
Miss Woeste belittles this by writing that the workers were paid at the two fifty rate with the differential being paid at the end of the year. This is untrue. If Miss Woeste had read Ford’s 1922 auto she would have read that the full amount was paid as part of the worker’s bi-weekly pay. She does reference David L. Lewis’ The Public Image Of Henry Ford in which she would have read the same thing.
If she willfully falsified the information then her credibility is definitely destroyed. If she hadn’t read whatever she did read carefully or just assumed that her way was the way Ford would have done it then her scholarship is seriously compromised.
In any event since her work is of an uncompromised prejudiced attempt to build up her Jews while discrediting Ford it has little scholarly value.
If she had read Ford’s my life and work then she would have learned why he was exposing the machinations of the Jews. His explanation is contained in Chapter VIII of My Life And Work entitled ‘Things In General’ p. 250:
The work which we describe as Studies In The Jewish Question and which is variously described by antagonists as ‘the Jewish campaign,’ the attack on the Jews,’ ‘the anti-Semitic pogrom’ and so forth needs no explanation to those who have followed it. Its motives and purposes must be judged by the work itself. It is offered as a contribution to a question which deeply affects the country, a question which is racial at its source, and which concerns influences and ideals rather than persons. Our statements must be judged by candid readers who are intelligent enough to lay our words alongside life as they are able to observe it. If our words and their observations agree, the case is made. It is perfectly silly to damn us before our statement has been shown baseless or reckless. The first item to be considered is the truth of what we have set forth. And that is primarily the item which our critics choose to evade.
Readers of our articles will see at once that we are not activated by any kind of prejudices, except it may be a prejudice in favour of the principles which have made our civilization. There had been observed in this country certain strains of influence which were causing a marked deteriorization of our literature, amusements, and social conduct; business was departing from its oldtime substantial soundness; a general letting down of standards was felt everywhere. It was not the robust coarseness of the white man, the rude indelicacy say, of Shakespeare’s characters, but a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression and to such an extent that it was time to challenge it. The fact that these influences were traceable to one racial source is a fact to be reckoned with, not by us only, but by the intelligent people of the race in question. It is entirely creditable to them steps have been taken by them to remove their protection from the most flagrant violators of American hospitality, but there is still room to discard outworn ideals of racial superiority maintained by economic or intellectually subversive warfare upon Christian society.
Our work does not pretend to say the last word on the Jew in America. It says only the word which describes his obvious impress on the country. When that impress is changed, the report of it can be changed. For the present, then, the question is wholly in the Jews’ hands. If they are as wise as they claim to be, they will labor to make Jews Americans, instead of laboring to make Americans Jewish. The genius of the United States of America is Christian in the broadest sense, and its destiny is to remain Christian. This carries no sectarian meaning with it, but relates to a basic principle which differs from other principles in that it provides for liberty with morality, and pledges society to a code of relations based on fundamental Christian conceptions of human rights and duties.
As for prejudice or hatred against persons, that is neither American nor Christian. Our opposition is only to ideas, false ideas, which are sapping the moral stamina of the people. These ideas proceed from easily identifiable sources. They are promulgated by easily discoverable methods; and they are controlled by mere exposure. We have simply used the method of exposure. When the people learn to identify the source and nature of the influence swirling around them it is sufficient. Let the American people once understand that it is not natural degeneracy but subversion that affects us, and they are safe. The explanation is the cure.
This work was taken up without personal motives. When it reached a stage where we believed the American people could grasp the key, we let it rest for the time. Our enemies say that we began it for revenge and that we laid it down in fear. Time will show that our critics are merely dealing in evasion because they dare not tackle the main question. Time will also show that we are better friends to the Jews’ best interests than are those who praise them to their faces and criticize them behind their backs.
One can say that Miss Woeste claiming to represent all her people, every one without exception, dares not grapple with the facts still. In fact she misrepresents them. Nor has the attitude changed. To quote Gerald L.K. Smith who was a witness: (
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/ford.htm )
The moment the manuscripts dealing with the Jewish problem reached the public a terrific howl went up from official Jewry. If I were to summarize the campaign of reprisal and abuse which was carried on against Mr. Ford and his Company, this summary alone would require a book. Every instrument of torture and abuse which could be imagined was carried on against Mr. Ford — smear, character assassination, ridicule, physical threat, boycott. The pressure was constant, consistent and endless. The most powerful and enigmatic pressures imaginable were brought to bear on Mr. Ford to stop the publication of ‘’The International Jew.’’ Finally the order came through to cease publication and to destroy the copies which were available. Jews and others went into the bookstores and bought and destroyed all copies and to steal the report out of the libraries. This made the book so rare and unfindable that it became a collector’s item.
Just as Ford was blasted in the 1920s so is he now as Miss Woeste’s polemic attests. Yet neither then nor now with Miss Woeste as an example were facts employed.
Ford wrote, actually dictated, three auto-biographies in his lifetime. Perhaps I am doing Miss Woeste a small injustice in doubting that she ever read them but if she has what she read doesn’t appear in her polemic.
For some strange reason she includes a rather detailed account of a blood libel trial in Russia called the Beilis Affair. Neither Ford nor Sapiro had anything to do with the Beilis case. What purpose does bringing it up serve?
She interjects another detailed account of the Leo Frank murder case in Atlanta, Georgia. True both Beilis and Frank were Jews but nothing in these two accounts pertains in any way to the Sapiro charges against Ford. How is the Ford trial affected by them? Miss Woeste demurs to explain.
In his 1922 auto published just after the first series of articles in which Ford gives valid reasons for publishing the Independent articles Ford also discusses in a number of places his views of the farm situation. One would think Miss Woeste might quote them giving us some idea of what Ford did think contra Sapiro.
We don’t even get an account of exactly what Sapiro was doing or thought he was doing. We have no idea of the results of his activities.
Sapiro’s activities were in the public sphere hence open to review and criticism. Having read the book twice I can’t tell you anything about Sapiro’s plan, that was even known as the Sapiro Plan, according to Miss Woeste.
There were other cooperative plans. How did they function and how did Sapiro differ from them and better them as Miss Woeste claims. Nothing. Instead we are told this was the first hate speech trial and Louis Marshall sabotaged it. Lewis Marshall was one of the Jews’ own.
We weren’t even given any examples of Ford’s hate speech to judge, just told he did it. Not even something like (Expletive deleted) the Jews. What were the hateful comments Ford made? Why was Ford even concerned about Sapiro’s activities unless he wasn’t doing anything for the farmers while collecting exorbitant fees, which he was.
Well, we’ll never learn from reading Henry Ford’s War On Jews. We won’t even really learn that much about the war. Very little substance there also.
What we do learn the most about is the Jewish attempt to turn the trial from a critique of Sapiro’s activities that might have had some similarities to fraud or the long con game to the irrelevant one of Ford purposely attempting to defame Jews rather than expose them.
Personally I don’t find Miss Woeste proving one or the other.
I don’t even know why she wrote this book, to expose this example of the waste of a court’s time, I guess.
Parts I, II and IV are found on my contemporarynotes.wordpress.com site. III and V are here.
A Review: Ed Sanders: An Informal History Of The Countercultures In The Lower East Side
October 31, 2013
Got His Pitchur On The Cover Of Life Magazine
A Review: Ed Sanders:
An Informal History Of The Counterculture
In The Lower East Side
By
R. E. Prindle
Ed Sanders- Chief Fug
Sanders, Ed: Fug You, An Informal History Of The Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, The Fugs, And Counterculture In The Lower East Side, 2011, The Da Capo Press, 424 pages.
Tuli Kupferberg
Ed Sanders? How few out of a hundred have even heard of him? Yet, Ed had an effect on the society of the Sixties not inferior to Andy Warhol. Perhaps a few more have heard of his recording group The Fugs. Originally the Village Fugs, and aptly named.
While never much of a success out of the East Side Bohemia of NYC Ed nevertheless merits attention. Ed was born in 1939 making him a graduate of the high school class of ‘57. I was class of ‘56 making Ed one year younger than me. But, what a difference a year makes. Let us do a little demographic study.
The swing years between Greil Marcus’ ‘old weird America’ and the new even ‘weirder America’ were the years of 1955, 1956 and 1957 with ‘56, my year, being the transition year between old and new. The key events of the turn was the effect of television and the destruction of network radio that resulted in teen oriented all music Top Forty radio. The class of ‘55 was the last year of ‘old weird’ America while ‘56 was maybe 70-30 the old and new with the old part the largest. Fifty-seven began the ‘new’ weirder America. Thus while Ed and I are only a year apart we still come from two different social outlooks as do all who followed after.
Demographics are important. By 1955 older teachers were fifty-five or sixty years old so they were born in say, 1890-95 to 1910. Not quite frontier but in the transition from horse and buggy to automobiles and airplanes. They were born into an America of the introduction of new technological wonders that actually went well beyond their imaginations. I mean, the fantasy of men flying came true. They saw Victoriana die and the modern world born. I mean, they saw biplanes turn into jet planes. They lived through two world wars witnessing the incredible changes succeeding those two wars. They were teens or in their twenties during the New Era of the Twenties. They were in their thirties in the Depression and Dust Bowl of the thirties. After enduring WWII they were hit by the Korean War and the struggles between the Communists and Honest people that ended in the defeat of their champion Joseph McCarthy. The three years in question were lived at the beginning of the on-going Negro revolution following the Brown vs. The Board Of Education decision that led to the unimaginable fact of Army troops invading Little Rock to cancel the rights of the majority in favor of a minority. Full lives to say the least.
Sanders, Kupferberg, Weaver- The Core Fugs
They had some strongly held opinions about life and America they passed on to us or attempted to do so. It was a clumsy attempt. The chaos of the Sixties and subsequent decades stemmed from that teaching. Most of them were rooted in pre-1920 attitudes as was to be expected. No matter how hip we are to the NOW our outlook is always conditioned on the past, near or far.
Teddy Roosevelt’s politics seem to have been the basis of their outlook. The twin themes of freedom and revolution were uppermost in their minds. Freedom was always ill defined if defined at all while revolution was held up to us as the highest ideal especially the American Revolution which was sort of the apex of history although Simon Bolivar who rode throughout Spanish South America bringing revolution to every colony on his way was a very close second. Of course the success of the countries he established failed to measure up that of the US. The French and Bolshevic Revolutions were never mentioned and were disregarded as they didn’t fit the fantasy. As these teachers were in place post-war through the fifties whole cadres of students were indoctrinated in this nonsense.
Basking in the fairly incredible triumph of the US in a two front war against very formidable enemies the teachers fairly glowed with the glory. Perhaps influenced by that achievement they made the incredible statement that each and every one of us could be whatever we wanted to be. That idea perhaps astonished us more than any other. It was obvious that some were smarter than others, all were of different physical stature, some had social disadvantages that meant denial by those that had them. Some had already made decisions that closed off vast areas of achievement and there was room for only so many at the top. Still, I suppose, that if we had the proper attitude there was a modicum of truth in the statement. Really, if you don’t try you don’t get anywhere. However rooted in a past now thirty or more years distant all the teachers were not dealing with current realities. The were not living in the NOW enough as we were in the Sixties.
There was a basic insecurity with Americans, even though we were taught to believe we were the greatest. A silly novel by Eugene Burdick of 1958, The Ugly American, turned that idea on its head. The idea of the novel was that in their foreign relations Americans were clumsy and inept compared to the smooth Communists of Russia, we antagonized the Third World despite sending wads of money and tons of food for free. I do suppose it’s true that you can’t buy love and Burdick seemed to revel at the thought.
As a result of Burdick’s novel Americans high and low embraced the notion that he or she was an Ugly American thus becoming inferior in their minds to every other people of the world. Just as the American South condemned a portion of their people to be White Trash, so Americans became the White Trash of the world. It was something to witness. Forty years or so on some nitwit rocker sang: ‘I’ll be your Ugly American if you’ll be my Asian Rose.’ Is that a deal or not? Blows your mind, doesn’t it? Blew mine.
I’m sure that most of us in the fifties had never heard of the CIA and if we had the initials conveyed little meaning. By the early sixties after the incident of the Bay Of Pigs not to mention the Kennedy assassination we had all heard of it but with little comprehension. Ed Sanders as well as the whole Left would fixate on the CIA as the epitome of evil. Of course they were either Communists or Communist sympatizers, Ed claimed to be a socialist, and hence were trying to divert attention away from the KGB and Communist activities. The James Bond movies beginning to appear in 1962 were metaphors of the cold war between the ‘Free World’ and the captive nations.
With some variation of this indoctrination under his belt Ed graduated HS, spent a couple semesters at UMissouri-KC then headed East to attend NYU. He say his intent was to become a rocket scientist but once in NYC he gravitated down to the Village which gradually enchanted him so that he abandoned solid propellants and took up ancient Greek, Latin and Egyptian because his mother told him the classical languages were the accoutrements of a gentleman. Perhaps so but there was no danger of a Village Fug ever being mistaken for a gentleman. Ed never was.
Once settled in the Village Ed involved himself with Village politics as he sought a place for himself under that black sun as a poet. The late fifties and early sixties were a time of the Beatnik poet. Coffee houses sprang up where the ‘poets’ could read to an eager audience, mostly of other would be poets. I was in the Bay Area of San Francisco at the time and while I wouldn’t call myself an habitué of North Beach I did attend a couple readings in 1964 where Ferlinghetti and a couple others read. Apparently it was the Coffee and Confusion Coffee House as I see from the web, but I don’t remember the name of the place. By 1964 things were pretty commercial and, at least, in SF the house was packed with employed weekend wannabe Beats.
Ed himself writes a humorous piece about a poetry reading in his Tales Of Beatnik Glory. While fiction the tales accurately portray the life. I have never been a big poetry fan and my expectations were not disappointed. Ed is an accurate barometer of his time and life on the Set.
On his quote page at the beginning of the book he quotes Maxim Gorky who said: ‘I was typing with all my might to make myself “a potent social force.” That pretty much sums up Ed’s career in ‘Beatnik heaven’ on the Lower East Side. His approach as he puts it was ‘A Total Assault On The Culture.’
Which culture isn’t exactly clear. Ed was a Catholic boy and he acquired and exhibited all the neuroses that the Catholic confession induces especially the rebellion against sexual repression, hence he turns to the pornography peculiar to Catholics. While there are some maybe many who were or are in full sympathy with Ed’s sexual neuroses I find them repellant while at the same time liking Ed.
Ed gives no indication that he himself indulged in licentiousness preferring the role of voyeur. He was a heavy drinker while going on dope binges. While sympathetic to homosexuality he says he passed on a night with his great hero Allen Ginsberg while he married young to his wife of fifty years now, Miriam. He had a couple kids and approximated a normal sexual life.
He did become a voyeur par excellence. In the enthusiasm of the time he became an underground film maker (read pornographer) with his hand held Bolex camera. He took up filming at the same time as Andy Warhol. He and Andy became acquaintances.
At the time that Andy began to create his Factory populated by an assortment of criminal amphetamine heads Ed did the same. During the late fifties and early sixties New York City was awash in amphetamines at all levels of society. One Dr. Max Jacobson otherwise known as Dr. Feelgood was busy administering massive doses of his amphetamine and vitamin cocktails, himself freely using it nearly on 24/7 basis. At one point he is said to have gone sleepless for thirty straight days.
While amphetamine used on that scale is destruction Max said and people believed that the vitamins destroyed the destructive qualities of the drug. Maybe so but within a few years there were burned out cases walking all over NYC.
Ed had his own reasons. I make an extensive quote interspersed with commentary. As Ed says the hips called the Village ‘the Set’ as in movie set. As would develop during the decade the notion that one was a mere performer in your own movie became prevalent if not endemic. Anyone’s life was a role. One could do anything without the loss of self-respect. The notion was that when your movie role was over you could revert to your former condition. People went to prison without any idea they were affecting their psychology and subsequent social position. I watched slack jawed.
In this passage Ed seems to see himself as a sociologist, pp. 54-55:
Another of my projects I called Amphetamine Head…Since 1959 I had been studying a group of artists and bohemians known around the Lower East Side as “A-heads,” amphetamine heads.
In those days people were called ‘heads’ as in he was a good head. A-heads means full time amphetamine freaks, vitamins or no vitamins.
They shot up amphetamine and often stayed up on A for days. Warhol said that he never slept more than two hours a day for years. There were plentiful supplies of amphetamines, sold fairly cheaply, in powder form on the set.
Amphetamine was legal at the time.
That fall I began filming Amphetamine Head. I decided to focus on the A-head artists, mainly painters, but there were some poets and jazz musicians as well who could be put under the banner of A. Anyone who lived on the Lower East Side and spent much time mixing with the street culture encountered A-heads. They roamed the streets, bistros, and pads compulsively shooting, or gobbling unearthly amounts of amphetamine, methidrine, dysoxin, bennies, cocaine, procaine- all of this burning for the flash that would to FLASH! It was almost neo-Platonic, as beneath the galactic FLASH! Were subsumed the dime flashes all urging toward FLASH!
Everybody from Washington Square to Tompkins Square called the street “the set”- “I’ve been looking for you all over the set, man. Where’s my amphetamine?” With a generation of folks readily present who viewed their lives as taking place on a set, there was no need to hunt afar for actors and actresses. What a cast of characters roamed the Village streets of 1963!
So there we have a set of fully blown minds. People who were out of it, insane for all practical purposes, Ginsberg’s ‘best minds of his generation,” running from fix to fix. These were us who back in ‘56 were billed as the hope and future or America with a capital A- no pun intended.
I’d heard rumors about a doctor [Max Jacobson- Dr. Feelgood] giving President Kennedy shots. Uppers. It turned out…that the rumors had a basis in truth. So there was plenty of gossip at the time that the President used amphetamines and that his doctors [actually only Max] injected him every morning. There were further speculations that the generals who met in the Pentagon war room every day planning atomic snuffs were a bit A-bombed themselves.
Possibly true. When I was in the Navy in ‘58-’59 bennies were commonly used while the Marine Camp Pendleton was awash with everything heard and unheard of.
I was fascinated with an amph-artist named Jim Kolb…I had observed the violence of the amphetamine heads and the raw power grabs that occurred in their glassy eyed universe after a few months of sleeping just twice a week.
One can compare this to Dylan’s Desolation Row in which he portrays Dr. Filth, that is Andy Warhol, and says:
Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the Factory
Where the heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders…
It was true that Warhol’s A-heads who were strung out on A would emerge from the Factory at midnight and predate on the streets. Dylan who was strung out on A himself would encounter them on the streets where there were undoubtedly stand offs between them and Dylan’s own crew.
While at the time we were attributing all kinds of fantastic interpretations to Dylan’s lyrics they can all be explained by what was going on in the Village. As the years progressed the clubs would become more vicious and violent until the apex of club land Studio 54 opened in 1977 giving the diamond glitz to that movie set of violence.
It was also commonly accepted on the set that the Germans had invented amphetamines and that the Nazis had shot up amphetamine during campaigns in WWII inspiring tales on the Lower East Side of futuristic battles involving fierce-breathing amphetamine humanoids, babbling shrilly like rewinding tapes, in frays of total blood.
It is true that a German did first synthesize A but at the end of the nineteenth century. A was further developed by a Japanese in 1919. In the early thirties Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson a Jewish German put together amphetamine and newly discovered vitamins to make his potent cocktail that he brought to the US in1936. Actually all combatants in WWII hopped up their troops on A, most notably the US and British pilots flying long bombing raids over Germany,
The heads also seemed proud that A-use destroyed brain cells. One of the A-heads might shout, “I lose trillions of cells every day, man, grooo-vy!”
Amphetamine altered sex. Some under A’s spell waxed unable in eros or sublimated their desire beneath a frenzy of endless conversation or art projects. Others with strong natural urges experienced this: that the erogenous areas became extended under A to include every inch of bodily skin. Men could not easily come, and women loved it forever. The image of amphetamine driven Paolos and Francescas writing for hours on a tattered mattress was humorous but true.
The Village has been described as the independent Republic of Bohemia. Certainly within the boundaries of the Set a certain hot house atmosphere prevailed. Ed is representative of that ethos of film makers, artists, musicians and hangers on. Ed was quite famous on the Set developing an opinion of himself quite at variance to what his influence was off the Set.
Ed’s attitude toward the A-heads while couched in sociological terms was also somewhat sadistic and perverted. He observed that may of the A-heads became compulsive drawers covering their apartment walls with drawings. Combining the art with his prurient sexual needs Ed conceived the idea of buying four ounces of A for about thirty dollars, renting an apartment then allowing A-heads to shoot up freely on the condition that he be allowed to film them at lovemaking and other activities. Through this approach at what must be considered pornography Ed amassed a couple thousand reels.
Unfortunately they were confiscated by the authorities during a raid and never returned. Maybe the CIA studied them in their search for a mind control drug.
Time flows along while Ed’s brain was hyper active. The idea of being a poet was paramount at the time. People who thought that they were poets were everywhere. Of course, that meant denying that anyone else was a poet. Heck I even flirted with the notion but realized that I much preferred prose. Ed developed a fair reputation as a poet. He can be seen reciting on videos on the internet. I would say he was a cut above the ordinary however I have little use for poetry.
Combining his interests in sex and poetry Ed decided to start a poetry magazine. For whatever reason he may have had he decided to name the magazine Fuck You- A Magazine Of The Arts. Had Ed consulted those with a little market savvy he might have reconsidered. While Fuck You is certainly an attention getter it makes buying it without a brown paper sack or even displaying it in your home a chancy affair. In fact, Ed gave most of them away. A non-Bohemian could go down to Soho for a laugh.
Ed was industrious and applied himself. He canvassed the big NYC poetic names and compiled an impressive list of contributors beginning with the arch freak, best mind of his generation, Allen Ginsberg. So, if you’re into poetry especially the sex obsessed Boho kind you would probably like Fuck You. Ed should have started a second magazine titled Fuck You Two.
Rapidly moving into retail Ed found a space in the center of things and opened his Peace Eye book store modeled on City Lights in San Francisco that Ed had not yet seen. I was familiar with City Lights and personally I wouldn’t have modeled anything on it. I can’t believe they actually sold enough to pay the rent. Who the hell buys poetry?
Ed aggressively promoted his sexual agenda in his Assault On the Culture drawing unwonted attention to himself from the authorities. Time was moving along. The hand on the dial was pointing to 1964. That year was the year of the World’s Fair. As should be obvious the social life on the Set had become fairly raucous and actually offensive to those not on the Set. Mayor Wagner determined it was time to tone things down on the Set lest tourists be offended. On the other hand maybe they would have come downtown to sample the outrageousness.
The hounds were on Ed’s trail. He experienced some difficulty as his ‘secret location on the Lower East Side’ was raided, the authorities illegally removing Ed’s precious porn flicks and anything else suspicious looking, naturally that included everything in their eyes. No receipts, no returns. Well! Who wouldn’t be offended? There was little Ed could do about it except try to stay out of jail. That became a struggle. After harassing the bejesus out of him the authorities declined to press charges. All those dirty movies were probably prize enough.
For Ed though his Total Assault On The Culture was going swimmingly. The great so-called Free Speech Movement began its course in 1964 on the campus of UC Berkeley in California. This was the turning point of the US group of revolutions. Trained from childhood to believe in revolution, any revolution, was good, Ed and several age cohorts enthusiastically applauded all revolution.
As part of the revolution a thing so small as a possible minute change in a detergent was described as a revolutionary new product. The idea of revolution as a positive thing was everywhere. It filled people’s minds. After the revolution, so to speak, occurring in the sixties commercial products shifted from revolutionary to ‘new and improved.’ The revolution was over; no new ones were to be entertained. Today detergents are just detergents, no need even for anything new and improved.
Ed’s description of his own revolutionary program was ‘a total assault on the culture.’ The Negro revolution well in progress of which Ed was part was a total assault on the culture; the Jewish revolution to which Ed was sympathetic was brought into focus by the so-called Free Speech Movement of which it was the leading edge. The sexual revolution encompassed both the Homosexual revo and women’s lib both of which fit into Ed’s total assault and he backed the Yobbo revo.
None of these revolutions could have taken place as they did without the US constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly etc.. Indeed Ed ingenuously celebrates that freedom, without which all other freedoms are meaningless, explaining that he was making unlimited use of it.
That he and the Negroes, Jews and others were able to do so was because all Americans believed in freedom of speech. Sharing that belief was to cause me all sorts of problems. Even though the concept was being stretched to the breaking point, that is turned against itself, the mantra at the time was ‘ I may disagree with what you say but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it! You don’t hear that mantra anymore; now you hear ‘Words can kill’ or hurtful things should be censored as they are so offensive. We are post-revolutions.
Ed himself began to become bitter when it slowly dawned on the government that indeed a violent assault on the government was taking place. At that point security agencies such as the FBI and CIA began serious surveillance. After all at the same time all these revolutions were taking place domestically we were becoming totally committed to the war against Communist Viet Nam. Ed claims to have been a socialist so that the backed that subversion too.
Since he vocally proclaimed his position in Fuck You Magazine, the name itself was intended to enrage, it can easily be understood why the authorities placed him on their list of desperadoes. It just seemed like fun at the time but it was more serious than we thought.
Obviously freedom of speech was no more threatened in 1964 than it ever had been, perhaps less. The lines between the various thems and us had just been drawn. The revolutionaries meant to deny freedom speech to the other, or bury it, as in these latter days has been nearly done.
Indeed in 1960 when I was attending Oakland (Calif.) City College anti-free speech limitations were in use by Liberals. We were forbidden to even mention let alone discuss what have become ‘protected’ minorities today. Crimes were committed in the name of what is now called diversity. In one class I had the misfortune to be sitting next to a Negro. A test paper came back on which I got a C while I noticed the Negro got a B. Then I noticed my score was a 78 while the Negroe’s was a 64. I objected saying I didn’t care if he got a B or not no matter what his score but since I had a higher score I should have an A or at the very least a B.
In full arrogance the teacher said he had only so many Bs to give out and since I had been the recipient of White Skin Privilege it was the Negroes turn and I would have to pay the debt. So obviously the revolution was prepared to lie, cheat and steal to succeed no matter who or how many get hurt.
Ed may have bought into that revolution and freedom crap as taught in schools but I obviously would have to be a counterrevolutionary.
So while Ed, absent from the scene, applauded the Berkeley Free Speech Movement I was on the spot viewing things somewhat differently. As I said the Free Speech Movement was part of the Jewish Revolution. There was no denial of free speech at UC before 1964 but by 1966 when the dust had settled the Jews were in control of the university and free speech was definitely curtailed.
As I entered the campus at Sather Gate in the summer of ‘66 a Jewish commissar sat at a table just inside the gate where we were to be vetted as to our politics which meant were we philo-semitic or not. Obviously one was not welcome if it was determined that one was ‘reactionary.’
Whatever Ed believed he was doing it was neither revolutionary in a positive sense nor was it furthering freedom of speech.
Into The Music
An Early Incarnation
Busying himself with his poetry, at which he was very successful as poetry goes, and running his Peace Eye bookstore, Ed conceived the idea of forming a musical group and why not? Musical groups were the generation’s mode of expression. This one he would give the most offensive name he could think of, The Fugs. The Fugs! Everyone in the world knew that fug was a euphemism for fuck. The ’comedian’ Redd Foxx had a punch line that went ’if you can’t fugg your can sugg it.’ So Ed calls his group the Village Fucks. Alright. So we know where that’s at. Nevertheless this low level pornography would get him national exposure. It even got his picture on the cover of Life Magazine in 1967 as part of the world wide cultural revolution. The Total Assault was working. He came to my attention out on the West Coast.
Ed thought of forming the Fugs interestingly enough at the same time that Andy Warhol had the idea and adopted the Velvet Underground as his house band. Both were influenced by Albert Grossman’s success in promoting Peter Paul And Mary and Bob Dylan. PP&M were already a big success in 1964 making barrels of money so why not go for the golden ring?
From 1964 to ’67 Ed and his Fugs scored a major success within the Set. After a fashion the Fugs became a sort of cabaret or burlesque act somewhat after the fashion of the theatre in the French movie The Children of Paradise. That movie served as the East Village model. The Great Boogie Woogie Dylan himself would imitate it in his film ’Masked And Anonymous’. A slight redundancy as to be masked is to make oneself anonymous. Bob was a poet.
As a sort of off Broadway act at the Players Theatre on the heart of Bleecker Street the Fugs may have appeared to be giving Dylan and the whole folk scene a run for their money. Café Society that was finding its way to Warhol’s Factory midtown also called on the Fugs at their theatre dropping back stage to pay their regards. Heady stuff, and I’m not being sarcastic.
At the same time Ed was negotiating with major labels Atlantic and Reprise. He was already on the local label ESP but that was run by a less than astute businessman. Terrific catalog of records though, perhaps the most interesting label in existence on many levels. The two major labels were soon to be subsumed under the Warner Bros umbrella. Atlantic fearing that Ed’s content might block its chance to be acquired by Warner’s dropped the group but they were picked up by Reprise. Reprise was owned by Frank Sinatra. When label Pres. Mo Ostin presented the deal for Sinatra’s approval Frank remarked sarcastically “I guess you know what you’re doing.” Frank hopped on the wave of the future as he rode the rock surf board into shore. Mo didn’t know that much as the Fugs were much less than a stellar act for them.
As 1967 ended then Ed and his band seemed poised for the major break through. However the year 1967 was unfortunate in being followed by the year 1968; the year of the Big Change. Ed’s total assault on the culture would be a success but he would be left behind.
It was a long way from 1960 when the decade began to 1968 just a year before the whole decade crashed at Altamont. The Snark the 60s pursued was a boojum you see.
Nineteen sixty eight was the year China stepped center stage with its and the world’s Cultural Revolution. Didn’t seem terrifying on this side of the Pacific but it sure was in retrospect. Ed might have thought that his Total Assault On The Culture was a success but he seems to have missed the year’s impact. The ethos that had carried he and his Fugs from ’62 to ’68 was exhausted. The year would see the shootings of Andy Warhol, M.L. King and Bobby Kennedy. Only Warhol would survive and that only through the miracle of modern medicine. Andy was actually brought back from the dead living on borrowed time for another twenty years.
The death of Bobby Kennedy killed Ed’s spirit while the course of events had grown far beyond his ability to deal with.
The Fugs had done well in the hothouse atmosphere of the Lower East Side but Ed was to find that that success couldn’t be exported from Bohemia. Even if the group succeeded in playing a venue they were frequently advised that it would be dangerous for them to try again.
Perhaps this was nowhere more obvious than when the Fugs were booked into the college town of Eugene, Oregon on May 4th of 1968. That was the day the revos went over the top in Paris. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year Mao kicked off the worldwide Cultural Revolution. The Chinese even financed the revolution in the small college town of Eugene, the home of the UofO. The Hippie invasion that Ed also represented had erupted, in the Eugenians’ eyes leaving then on a sharp knife edge of anxiety when the Maoists arrived. Wait, we’re not finished yet. In addition to those irritants there was the invasion of the SDSers, Students For A Democratic Society led by New York City Jews in denims who hit town like a small tsunami adding to the disruption.
As if the phony Free Speech Movement hadn’t been enough, the arrival of the phony Students for a Democratic Society added insult to injury. We all, at least myself, believed we had freedom of speech in a democratic society but then along came these freaks redefining terms. Got away with it too.
Eugene’s home grown hippie ’cancer’ that wouldn’t go away was a record store by the name of Chrystalship. You are free to guess who owned it. That’s right, me. I am not now ever was a revolutionary or even a Liberal, discontented but no revo, card holding or not. I just wanted to get to Paris in some style. As it was the town fathers determined that I was behind everything. I almost had my own personal FBI agent. I was followed, my mail was opened, phone tapped and had my shipments illegally searched with no attempt to conceal what they were doing and no recourse. Some democracy.
Even they couldn’t stop the Cultural Revolution or keep the SDSers out of town but they sure as hell weren’t going to let some pornographic group with the name of Fugs, short for Fucks, play in town. Mao was one thing, Ed Sanders was another.
On May 2nd the door was slammed shut in Eugene, the venue denied. Acting quickly the promoters found a spot twenty miles out of town in the still smaller village of Creswell. A phone call scuttled that plan. At that we ticket holders thought the jig was up but, not so. A secret location on the east side of town was found that was so secret I’m sure that half the ticket holders couldn’t find it and gave up.
Ed’s memory is fairly clear on this. I’m comparing his notes with mine to reconstruct the scene as accurately as possible. About ten miles to the South of Eugene, maybe a few miles further, was a new motel, fairly glitzy for Eugene, maybe built by drug money, named The Lemon Tree. Obviously the owners were Peter Paul and Mary fans because there were no lemon trees in Oregon. Ed remembers playing at the motel but I respectfully disagree with him. He stayed there but he didn’t play there.
I honestly can’t say where the place he played was except that it was out in the country turn right here turn left there and when you got there you couldn’t be sure that was it plus there was only a fifty-fifty chance you could find your way back to the highway in the dark. Once arrived you drove over a cow pasture out to this largish barn and parked in the high grass.
There were no lights in the barn except for a couple spots jury rigged over the stage, if there was a stage, hard to see in the dark. For some reason there were actual bleachers three or four tiers high arranged against the back wall. All fifteen attendees strung out on the benches in the dark. We could barely see each other. I held on tight to my wife so that we didn’t separated and have to stumble around trying to find each other. ’Hello, over there, over here.’
Way across the barn on the opposite wall was this stage faintly illuminated on which the band would and did stand. Thus, unless we made some noise the Fugs had no way of knowing that they were not playing to an empty barn. We were forbidden to get any closer, nor did we know whose hands we were in. Could have been plain clothes cops for all we knew.
So, away over there the Fugs stepped up to the microphone. They were a mangy looking group, voluntary poverty was in evidence. As a child were asked to pray for the poor heathen Chinese before dinner but we should have been praying for our poor heathen selves. The Chinese are doing OK. But Ed and the boys could sing joyfully in their rags. At the time we thought they were trying to be as far out as possible. They weren’t doing a bad job. Tuli Kupferberg, the absolute weirdest of the lot, Tuli had mastered weird, and remember we in the audience had nothing to brag about, was playing an eight foot long staff. It had six or seven clatter devices on it so he could keep a semblance of a beat. He lifted it up and slammed it into the ground to some effect. Beyond that I can’t even remember if they played Ah, Sunflower Weary Of Time or Boobs A Lot, Slum Goddess Of The Lower East Side which is what I came for. I may have been the only one of the Eugene Fifteen who had ever heard the Fugs on record. I sure as hell hadn’t been able to sell any.
When the concert ended we tripped and stumbled out of the barn, hopped in our cars and hoped the hell we could find our way back to I5. The concert was the high point of my concert going career. It was what one calls an adventure. I have relived it over in my imagination many times over the years. An evergreen if there ever was one. Ed recalled it in his pages with good reason. It was a turning point in his career.
Ed tells it this way, page 312:
We flew up to Portland, Oregon, May 3 after our fun in LA for a gig there and the next day drove to Eugene, the very day protesting students were occupying the streets of Paris. We played a club called the Lemon Tree next to a beaver pond. Before the performance I walked out to the water’s edge, where I experienced a great transmission of peace. I had to go back in my mind to the lakes of my Missouri youth or Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Peace In The Valley”, which helped me through the grief from my mother’s death in ‘57, to find much consolation as I had during those moments. The beaver pond by the Lemon Tree was the best time for me in ‘68.
That wasn’t a beaver pond Ed. That was an artificial pond the owners dug to glitz up their motel. It was situated between the motel and I5. There hadn’t been a beaver in those parts since John Jacob Astor founded Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. If there had been it would have been killed as a nuisance. Beaver’s chew down saplings Of course saplings spring up all by themselves by the millions but we don’t want no beaver felling even one.
My memory could be wavering but I think that on the way out from the barn I saw Ed after the concert squatting beside the pond. I’m sure he must have been crushed by that bizarre performance to a seemingly empty barn. It had to have been hard after four years of very hard work. It appears that he did have an epiphany of some kind. If he had known he was going to be playing to fifteen people he couldn’t see in a dilapidated barn I’m sure he would have thought of retiring and he did then. As his mind was made up to end the Fugs at the beginning of ‘69 I suspect that that dismal concert set his mind on the track.
Well, Ed, I really enjoyed the show.
It Is Impossible To See Where You Are
When You’re There
While Ed was living his life time was passing and circumstances were changing. When Ed began the Fugs in 1964 what he was doing was fitted to the time and was possible. By the end of 1968 when he determined to end the group he was still acting on his 1964 impulse while by 1969 he would have had to adjust to new conditions. Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues and a host of other bands were more contemporary than the Fugs. The Fugs were old hat.
Even Ed’s solo album, Sander’s Truck Stop, of ‘69 was a stale joke. I thought it was OK myself and I liked his second effort Beer Cans On The Moon but they also were out of time. Ed and his Fugs were part and parcel of the Sixties. A very few if any of the Sixties groups made it into the seventies and those that did reinvented themselves. The Jefferson Airplane became the Starship. Other split off and went solo. Donovan just evaporated although he was as talented in the seventies as before.
The Rolling Stones adapted despite themselves. When their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham sold them out to Allen Klein it may have been their saving. With Klein in control of their outdated sixties output the Stones were forced to change. Jagger found a financial manager in Rupert Loewenstein who turned them into a prosperous stage act, sort of performance art, cabaret or burlesque, along the lines of Yoko On or Andy Warhol or even the Fugs. Jagger certainly saw the Fugs on Bleecker and may have picked up an idea or two. They were able to successfully adapt their musical style to the seventies.
As a Sixties group Ed and the Fugs were finished. You can never go home again; when they left the East Side to assault the culture of the entire United States their East Side base was destroyed.
Out in the real world what were record stores supposed to do with a band called the Fugs and a record titled It Crawled Into My Hand Honest? Ed was a vaudeville act, soft porn, how could a store recommend stuff like that to the underage person who formed a large part of the business? Who wanted to bring the law down on themselves. Couldn’t be done. Hell, The Rolling Stones nearly got me clubbed down with their sado-masochistic cover for their record Black And Blue, as in welts and bruises. It got ugly in the seventies, post Stonewall.
Ed closed up shop and returned to civilian life. Civilian life had changed a great deal too. A lot social errors were accruing. The generation hadn’t done such a great job. The influx of Puerto Ricans and Negroes into the Bronx combined with the efflorescence of hard drugs, heroin, was turning the Bronx into a hell hole or worse; even an abandoned hell hole as the turmoil drove peaceable citizens out. And then they burned it down. Ed even left to move to the Lower East Side. Even there things were turning violent. The streets were no longer safe. Near Ed’s apartment a well known Hippie couple around the Set were murdered in a basement, the girl after being raped repeatedly. The perp was a Negro living upstairs from them. He felt obligated to commit the crime because of his religion which was described as the Yoruba religion.
Probably not one in a thousand knew who the Yorubas were and that they migrated from Nigeria in Africa and that their so-called Yoruba religion was actually a form of Voodoo called Santeria. Santeria was popular with Negroes and some Whites along the entire Eastern Seaboard yet few knew of it then and few do today.
Ed had moved from the Bronx to the Lower East Side and from there to the West Village where he was greeted with another double murder outside his front door. Where next? Where any reasonable person would go. Ed moved to the country and painted his mailbox blue, up in Woodstock, the feudal estate of Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. And then the Tate-La Bianca murders occurred out West in LA. Ed decided to investigate Charlie Manson and his Family. Write a book.
Actually the murder of the Hippie couple by the Voodoo killer on Ed’s former block was as horrific as the Tate-La Bianca killings but no one had ever heard of the dead Hippies on the Set and if they had they wouldn’t have cared.
So Ed went West where he stayed a couple years pretty thoroughly investigating Charlie’s shenanigans. He did a good job of it too. Of course he had to pull his punches somewhat to avoid lawsuits but he apparently lowered his guard at the wrong time. Some Satanist group called the Process Church Of The Final Judgment, these were apocalyptic times, not wishing the truth of their organization to surface threatened legal action on the publisher. They gutted Ed’s book. It was probably a publicity stunt as the Process made no objection to the English edition.
At this point in Ed’s memoir he folded his tent and quietly slipped away remarking only that all his Fugs tapes and artefacts lay neglected in boxes for the next fifteen years until the Hippie romantic revival began.
Ed had created a legacy of sorts, intellectual properties, that he could exploit after 1985. So he was restored to some significance in the aftermath.
Ed does not let grass grow under his feet however. When he wearied of running a rock group he returned to his scholarly roots as so many of us did when the Sixties vanished into thin air. He did have a solid education in the Classics. Since then he has written extensively although with the same level of popularity as the Fugs.
However no matter how audacious a nine volume history of the United States in verse- in verse!- may be, epic poetry of that kind has a very low threshhold of sales. I’m sorry Ed, I’d like to but I’m just not going to do it, I’m not going to read American history in verse, especially not a socialist interpretation.
Social Redemption And The Fugs
So forty years on Ed tells all. I’ve read the book twice now while I’ll read it at least a third time. Many of the nuances pass over one’s head the first and even the second time. Ed has a direct style as though one on one and as an document explaining a part of the Sixties the book is essential. Presented in a chronological form probably patterned after Andy Warhol’s Popism: The Warhol Sixties Ed avoids any intellectual pretensions laying things out as they were street level. Deceptively simple as they say. Well worth picking up if you have a love affair with the Sixties going, or are a student of the times. An essential document as I said.
But what were the results of Ed’s ‘total assault on the culture?’ Of course Ed was only part of the assault which was endemic to the time. Everyone had been reared on the notion of romanticized revolution and unrestricted freedom. Warhol was a key figure on the Lower East Side, although midtown and uptown himself, as was Jonas Mekas of the underground cinematheque. The filmmakers impact would have been nil without Mekas. I can only tolerate underground stuff because I’m a dedicated scholar. Kenneth Anger may have been the best of the lot and that is not saying much. Still, there are believers and so much of the corpus is stored at MOMA.
Drugs have turned into a way of life a la Brave New World although others than Ed were responsible for that. Today it’s not do you use drugs but which drugs do you use. Ed’s fixation on sex has developed as he would have liked. There are few mainstream Hollywood films produced today without an obligatory fuck scene within the first ten minutes, full frontal nudity female and male with fellatio and cunnilingus scattered here and there. Homosexual and Lesbian movies are readily available for the interested and show on TV. On that level Ed’s assault was a total success.
Plus there are forty or fifty thousand reported female rapes a year. Gangs of youths roam the streets practicing their game of knockout king; that is sucker punching pedestrians seriously injuring many and killing not a few. Huge riots take place at fair grounds where wild youths exercise their freedom by assaulting fair goers. The police make little effort to curtail their activities. So some people are exercising their total freedom at the cost of others.
We have a socialist redistributor of wealth, also a Negro, as our president so all that marching down South Ed participated in paid off handsomely.
In addition his oppressed Negroes are now in control of some pretty impressive real estate where they are so oppressive that White people run screaming for the suburbs Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Montgomery, Atlanta, Philly, half of New Jersey and beginning November 5, 2013 New York City are Negro towns as well as many many more not to exclude the capitol of the Confederacy itself, Richmond, Virginia. So, Ed gets an A+ for his efforts there.
And of course homosexuality is a ‘protected’ activity in which they have obtained the right to teach pederasty to kindergartners in public schools. Also any girl a virgin past fourteen or sixteen at the latest is considered a freak who had better get promiscuous or else.
Over all, I would say Ed’s total assault on the culture has been a roaring success. There are some though, myself included, who consider Ed’s success a crime against humanity. Illiteracy is on the rise, diseases once though eradicated are returning with a vengeance. Bedbugs, once thought eradicated have returned with a thump infesting half the country with solid prospects of infesting the rest.
Well, nobody’s perfect. I’m sure Ed sits back, Guiness in hand, smiling to himself and thinking job well done. Well, handsome is as handsome does as my old high school teacher used to say.
And then that other guy said: If you can’t fugg it, sugg it.
Chap. VIII: Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
October 4, 2013
Marianne Faithfull:
The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
by
R.E. Prindle
Chapter VIII
Changes
Would anybody like to try the changes I’m going through?
–Donovan.
In Her Glory
Life at best is difficult. Change after difficult change presents itself. Of necessity life is lived on the fly. One must always deal with fixtures and forces one cannot comprehend on first confrontation. In a way then we can hardly be responsible for the decisions we make unless we have enough experience to interpret that with which we are confronted correctly. At any point a controlling psychological fixation through misinterpretation may cause to act against our best interests. All further experience then will be interpreted through and disturbed by one or more fixations in our subconscious of which we probably are not aware.
Sexually Marianne was probably confused by the sexual scenes she observed at her father’s Braziers Institute contrasted with her subsequent teaching of abstinence at St. Joseph’s Convent School. The confusions conflicted her sexual attitudes in later life, attitudes she was unaware of and never resolved.
Young Marianne
Once she left her father’s governance passing into that of her mother’s she lived not in poverty but in relative hardship; luxuries if experienced at all were few and far between yet she did received an upper class education and outlook at St. Joseph’s.
Her mother was apparently strongly Bohemian having been involved with the stage pre-WWII. She encouraged Marianne in the Bohemian direction which Marianne found congenial, sought and never abandoned. The girl was interested in the stage while becoming a Joan Baez style folk singer after leaving convent school in Reading at seventeen.
While not beautiful in any classic sense she was yet attractive with a great figure making her a desirable sexual object. The sixties was the decade of wide open sex making all women mere sexual objects. Her first reaction was to seek a stable married life choosing John Dunbar as an appropriate husband. Dunbar was Bohemian in outlook while apparently headed for an academic career.
At this point fate intervened. At a party with Dunbar she met the record producer Andrew Loog Oldham who perceived her persona as a marketable commodity in the pop music world. As an added bonus Marianne could actually sing, having performed as a folk singer.
She was still an impressionable girl of just seventeen just after the Pill had been introduced with little ability to successfully traverse the changes she would be called upon to go through. These would be formidable and rapid calling for huge energy reserves on a day to day basis. Not an enviable situation.
While most musicians go through a relatively long learning process and struggle to succeed Marianne struck gold the first time out without even trying. Her first minimal three minute effort, if it was an effort, established her as the pop princess or queen of the generation. Her innocent convent school persona was perfect in a vulgar world. But it was a persona at odds with the one Marianne would seek and embrace- she became the devil with a blue dress on.
While the music or, really, record business seems very attractive from a distance it is literally vile from the inside. Everything connected with it is dishonest, the record companies, musicians, lackeys, the whole number. Nobody remains unstained.
It is truly a man’s world, even a gay man’s world, in which the men have no respect for womankind. Women are expected to merely service the sexual desires of the male performers. They have no use beyond that. Thus one has the phenomenally debauched groupie scene that amazed the world during the sixties. After that there was no longer anything amazing.
Having witnessed sex acts at Braziers of numerous descriptions the pop music world satisfied this side of Marianne’s psyche. At the same time a desire for a chaste life pushed her in the direction of marriage with Dunbar which desire she consummated, however Dunbar proved to be not the ideal choice.
While Marianne thought she would be leading a sedate intellectual academic life with him as a professor he turned out to be as much or more a Bohemian as she was. Quite frankly he failed her.
Having acquired a wife he did not act responsibly toward her. He was blindsided by her recording success and perhaps belittled by her financial success. In effect he was supported by his wife which is always a difficult situation. The changes he faced were in themselves formidable and he didn’t have the character to meet them. Still, a man doesn’t fill his house with dopers and heroin addicts. Marianne can hardly be faulted for resenting it after getting up in the morning to find a house full of conked out junkies in rooms littered with used needles. The transition from Braziers to St. Joseph’s to high degeneration must have been changes hard to adapt to. Sent her head spinning.
Marianne Searching
The change from the straitened circumstances of her childhood and youth still actually in progress to one of affluence in which she could indulge her wildest fancies in buying clothes and more clothes. Her lack of maturity hurt her badly. In this case her hero William Blake’s notion that the road of excess leads to wisdom was not quite true, it led to penury.
Not clearly seen by many at the time the pop world split into two streams, the British pop stream of the fifties soon to be extinct and the Rock world of pop princes and princesses of the future. The Beatles straddled both worlds while curiously Marianne may have been the first to emerge as a star of the Rock world soon to be followed by the Rolling Stones.
As such even though having only one hit single to her name she was on a par with the Beatles and the Stones while being superior to the lesser groups following in the train of the Beatles and Stones. Thus in the salon formed around the pop art dealer Robert Fraser she held a place of primacy that she never realized. Her tragedy was that she was too young and inexperienced to grasp her opportunity making a series of inept decisions while being seen only as so much poontang by the Rockers and of transitory fame by a series of inept managers.
Thus, unable to find someone capable of carefully building her career she did become transitory, or her career going into hiatus, she did lose her place while gravitating to the dominance of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Gradually her royalties diminished so that she was financially dependent on Jagger while still married to John Dunbar. Deep in a milieu of drug users she found their allure irresistible.
However conscious she was that she had been and still was to some extent a celebrity she thought to regain that identity. Feeling unable to compete with Jagger as a recording star she chose to follow her mother’s wishes and take up acting. In her enthusiasm to and need to show Jagger that she was somebody too, that she was his equal, as a performing artist she aroused Jagger’s interest in also being a movie star. He, being a more marketable commodity soon gave evidence of eclipsing her as an actor rather than staying in recording as she assumed he would.
Her own space having been preempted she developed an affinity for Brian Jones of the Stones who was essentially in her situation in his relation to the group. He too was being forced out thereby losing his identity.
When Brian died she then in sympathy decided to follow him overdosing with pills that would have killed her had not Jagger been alert enough to rush her to the hospital. As much as anything her suicide attempt was meant to get away from Jagger’s dominance. That move now being thwarted she had no choice but to walk out which she did in 1970. Thus began the rest of her life.
II
Marianne The Wild Thing
The Rock and Art scene was a drug scene. Bob Fraser’s salon centered around Rock musicians was also a drug center. Fraser introduced members of his salon to all drugs including heroin. Marianne had a favored position in Fraser’s salon early learning of heroin to which Fraser himself was addicted. By the time she walked out on Jagger in 1970 she had been addicted for some time. Heroin was to remain her central fixation throughout her life.
Jagger disapproved of her addiction so she was forced to conceal it from him. When her royalties decreased she no longer had her own money becoming dependent on Jagger. Not wishing to plead for large sums of money from Jagger in order to obtain her heroin she prostituted herself to Keith Richard’s factotum Spanish Tony Sanchez.
Sanchez was an aspiring criminal who came to Richards through Groovy Bob Fraser. Sanchez had met Fraser in a bar after which the friendship blossomed. Fraser had contracted gambling debts to the notorious Kray Brothers, the criminal kingpins of London. The Krays were threatening Fraser with grievous bodily harm if they didn’t get their money. According to Sanchez in his autos Up And Down With The Rollings Stones and I was Keith Richard’s Drug Dealer he volunteered to negotiate the debt with the Krays which he did.
At that time, following their US Mafia model, the Krays were attempting to lift the Beatles from Brian Epstein who also had large gambling debts to them so there is no reason to disbelieve Sanchez. Following the episode with Fraser Sanchez was employed by Richards as drug/procurer-factotum at the fabulous salary of two hundred fifty pounds a week. This leads me to believe that the Krays were using Sanchez to infiltrate the Stones possibly with the intent of taking them over.
Sanchez was always resented by Richards and the Stones but he managed to stick with them until the mid seventies when Richards was able to shake him. In his vanity Sanchez considered himself an essential member of the Stones’ entourage, if not an actual member of the Stones.
Marianne’s misfortune was that everyone wanted to sleep with her, a further misfortune was that she obliged. Thus she and Tony had a sexual liaison for several years. This raises the question then whether Tony was also pimping for her. Certainly as his criminal associates knew he was sleeping with her they would want to also. Not being a fool Tony may have named a price and received it. Whether he or she could have successfully resisted is open to question. The US Mafia certainly used their female artists to gratify their desires.
In the mid sixties additionally, once again, through Fraser Marianne had become part of the Satanic crowd. Through Fraser she was introduced to the arch US Satanist, Kenneth Anger. Through them she was introduced to the writing of Great Satanist of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley and also the writing of the nineteenth century French arch Satanist, Eliphas Levi, not Jewish despite the name. And then the modern Satanist classic the Russian Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita published in 1968.
Also in this period she became involved with the Satanist Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Marianne downplays her involvement with Satanism but it was much more serious than she is willing to admit.
Playing against this background Marianne renewed an acquaintance with the Irishman Lord Patrick Rossmore. He was 43 to her 24. I merely mention this, it makes me no never mind what the ages are so long as the couple is comfortable with each other. In this case they weren’t comfortable. The two, in a sort of a farce became engaged but never married parting as they met in a friendly sort of way within several months.
While Mick was aggressively dominating, Marianne seems to have chosen Lord Rossmore because shy and retiring as he was she could dominate him. According to Hodkinson the couple rarely saw each other, he being in Ireland while Marianne remained in London closer to her dope supply.
True to her interpretation of William S. Burroughs degenerate novel, Naked Lunch, she led a totally debased and degraded life as a street junkie or, at least, her version of it. Remember it was her movie of Marianne and she was pretending to be a sociologist. She cultivated the friendship of total degenerates such as the artists Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. She also became friends with the total junkie, writer Alexander Trocchi. Also at this time becoming fast friends with another lowlife, Henrietta Moraes who she says was a close friend until she died. Marianne was able to sink to lower levels than any of these people and gloried in it.
It was during this period of 1970-71 that she says she sat on the wall in Soho staring into the bomb crater. In his first biography Hodkinson scoffed at this. According to him this wall was a waiting station lined with junkies alert for their supply.
By 1971 the Stones had become tax exiles in the South of France so that Spanish Tony was with Keith no longer able to supply Marianne with her drugs, thus, we suppose, the wall. As Marianne had no regular income during this period, although adequate royalty checks still arrived irregularly, there does arise the question of how she paid for her dope. As a junkie Marianne had no qualms about running up tabs she couldn’t pay and apparently didn’t. At one point she boasts she left New York owing several dealers 20K each while flippantly adding she had no intention of ever paying. Whether she succeeded or not is not known.
Marianne vehemently denies that she resorted to prostitution although there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence she did. A careful reading of her second auto, Memories, Dreams And Reflections, gives some hints. At one point she retorts to an admirer that she is not a two-bit prostitute, that it would take 200 pounds to be with her. Perhaps a joke but the price sounds right, her retort has the ring of authenticity.
In the same auto she claims first hand acquaintance with all the working girls of the area. There is only one way such first hand knowledge could be obtained. There is or was a video on the internet in which a camera had been placed within a building between two half open doors. Marianne dressed in some pretty snappy expensive looking working girl gear walks in front of the camera, notices it, shows alarm, then quickly turns a corner then flattening herself against the wall to peer back at the camera. It seems evident that she was going to or returning from a job.
She seems to have worked from 1970-71 through at least 1974 through her association with Madeleine D’Arcy. In 1971- during the recording of Exile On Main Street when Tony Sanchez accompanied Keith to the South of France Tony met Madeleine with whom he fell deeply in love and had a relationship with her in France.
Upon returning to England he apparently resumed some sort of relationship with Marianne as well as Madeleine. Marianne in her turn began a lesbian relationship with Madeleine, perhaps to spite Tony, who she despised personally, or so she says. Tony was angry at the relationship.
It then appears that Marianne and Madeleine functioned as high price prostitutes or perhaps call girls between ‘72 to ‘74. In ‘74 Madeleine as Marianne recalls had gone back to turning fifteen pound tricks in Brighton. ’Going back’ implies that formerly she received higher payouts, perhaps 200+ as Marianne received.
As she hadn’t heard from Madeleine for a little while she called at her apartment. When no one answered she called a couple bravos to break down the door. One was a Maltese pimp and drug dealer. At that time in London the Maltese are said to have controlled crime in the West End. That Marianne could call on them to supply help implies a certain degree of familiarity with the underworld. The other person’s identity Marianne doesn’t indicate so there is the possibility it could have been Tony. When no one answered the door the two men broke it down.
Entering the apartment Madeleine was found dead on her bed. She had apparently been beaten to death although not molested as she was artfully laid out in a beautiful full gown. Thus whoever killed her loved her. This points to Tony although the crime was never solved.
So, if Marianne says she never turned to prostitution perhaps not, but there is sufficient evidence to indicate she did. The whole period from 1970-1974 is very hazy in her memoirs.
While she was supposedly incognito on the streets of Soho, as if Marianne could ever be incognito, lost to view of the music world, Michael Leander, who had been her producer suddenly got the idea to make an LP with her so he beat the bushes, scoured the walls so to speak, like any good detective, tracking her down in Soho supposedly sitting on her wall staring into the bomb pit. He induced her back into the studio where they recorded the LP Rich Kid Blues, a return to Marianne’s folk roots.
For some reason the record was shelved not being released until decades later. After this she took up with Oliver Musker who she was associated with for the two years from ’72 to ’74.
III
The Myth Of Marianne
Down And Out In Soho
For all her emotional problems Marianne was a bright girl. She read. Among her readings were those of the psychologist C.G. Jung. Among Jung’s ideas was that of the personal myth. By that he means everyone must have a personal myth to survive, to make sense of what one is doing or what is happening to you. This was more or less the same notion of Andy Warhol’s that if you don’t like the way your life is going pretend it’s a movie. That’s a sort of displacement so what’s happening is just a script that was written for you. Your own personal myth. Lots of people were living in their own movie.
It seems probable, in observing Marianne’s life, that she came across Jung’s observation and set about creating her myth. For proper understanding I quote Jung: p. 197 of the Red Book as quoted in the introduction by Sonu Shamdesani:
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “what is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to the question and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust…
So in the most natural way, I took on myself to know “my” myth– so I told myself– how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it.”
During the period of 1970 ‘72 Marianne had fallen on the hardest times, the lack of a model for her life. It seems obvious that the wall bit is perhaps a metaphor for her mental state while sunk into her heroin addiction which perhaps had led to other unsavory activities.
If she really thought she was incognito amongst the street people and shopkeepers who she tells us were wonderful to her, what would have been just another junkie earning money by any means necessary, she is either misremembering or was oblivious to the truth. Marianne was a nationally recognized figure on TV and records who had won the hearts of the people. If anything, one can only think that they wondered how she could have fallen so low but in a manner they still revered the image she had been. On the other hand she says guys drove by and yelled ‘you dirty slag’ out the window. Marianne was in denial.
Without a myth of herself that was all she could do. I don’t know when after her fall from grace in 1967 she had read Jung to conceive of creating her myth but the period after 1970 has certainly been mythologized. Remember she titled her second auto Memories Dream And Reflections which just happens to be the title of Jung’s own auto without the And.
As it was necessary for Marianne to form a new persona after the Redlands bust it appears that the persona began taking shape during this period of extreme depression from ‘70 to ‘72. When she met Musker and perhaps even Leander recorded Rich Kid Blues with her, she began to form the myth and regain an identity and perhaps sanity.
Musker led to Ben Brierly which was a key recovery period and then later she grabbed hold of the supreme works of despair and depression, the works of Brecht and Weil. God, that’s hurting.
All her associates in the mid seventies were Creatures From The Black Lagoon. Black Lagoon was one of the great psychological sci-fi parodies of the fifties. Freud’s vision of the unconscious dominated the period so in Lagoon some ‘scientists’, always portrayed as evil themselves, discover a black lagoon in the Brazilian jungles. The circular pool, of course, represents Freud’s vision of the unconscious in which demons and monsters lurk so the Creature, stirred up by the scientists, perhaps it may be read as psycho-analysts, emerges in all his horror dripping with weeds from the black lagoon. Coulda been me I thought as I sat watching.
So, Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsburg, Corso, Bacon, Lucien Freud,, Moraes, all the people a reasonable person would run from. No matter how attractive they may appear on the printed page they were much less so in person. I’ve met a few of them and, shall we say, I knew I would never fit in.
Marianne did fit in. She was beginning to reconcile her Braziers Park sexual education with her high Catholic teaching. Andy Warhol said if your life is not going as you like it, pretend it’s a movie. Marianne was in the unique position where she could live her myth in movies, on the stage and on phonograph records as well as in real life. In her mind she could make it work but real life upsets things once in a while. Plus Marianne in her reading read William Blake whose line ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ was the mantra of the whole junkie crowd as well as Marianne’s. Who would be seduced by bull shit like that? Beaudelaire, Rambeau and the French Symbolists also provided such like justification for the path she was on. Thus Marianne was able to justify her myth by such philosophy.
Marianne could thus justify sexual excesses, perhaps even prostitution, as drinking the cup to the dregs on the path to wisdom. At the same time she was able to split her personality in a Braziers/St. Joseph’ contrast so that she could remain ‘pure’ while sympathizing with the plight of all those unfortunate prostitutes she knew so well. That actually was a sort of Rich Kid Blues so Leander was perhaps more prescient than Marianne thought.
Marianne who had many acting offers during these years and at least one serious role with Roman Polanski all of which she blew ostensibly because of her heroin addiction but also possibly because as she felt so degraded she didn’t think she deserved success because of Redlands. At any rate she was the darling of the counter culture and remains so down and out or not.
Oliver Musker an old Etonian met her through Christopher Gibbs who paled with Bob Fraser at a party in 1972 so she wasn’t so incognito that she wasn’t attending parties. Still her addiction was obvious enough that Musker wanted to save her. Therefore he took control and put her in rehab. But what’s rehab to an addict? Perhaps a time out. Of course Marianne says Musker saved her life. Well, romance, romance, romance.
Musker was an apparent stable interlude in Marianne’s self-destructive course. He kept her on a more or less even keel for these two years. No less destitute than she had ever been Marianne accepted a role filmed in India titled Ghost Story. Not quite the hardship Marianne attests, indeed, very glamorous to anyone in her fan base and elsewhere.
She and Musker traveled to India and from there to Hong Kong. So she was leading a life many could envy. Not too much is available about Musker but he apparently found India congenial as a business opportunity. He currently runs a furniture factory out of Delhi.
But he was an overbearing, dominant sort enforcing his will with violence. He knocked out Marianne’s upper two front teeth. When he tried to manage Marianne’s career he became too much for her and they parted company. Or, perhaps, Musker was just a crutch to get her over a very rough patch. By 1974 perhaps she thought she no longer needed him.
And then as part of the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom Musker was a type of male and as part of her identity she was to experiment with different types. That would lead to her future second husband Ben Brierly. The music scene about to transit the very destructive Punk era so, perhaps Marianne saw it as chance to revive her recording career.
As I see it Marianne went into shock after Redlands. The shame of the Mars bar bit was too much for her psyche to handle. The court’s denial of the chance to defend herself and possibly explain was an egregious insult that she could find no way to handle. This kind of shock takes time to digest and find some way to regain one’s composure. Thus Marianne’s life from that point to her suicide attempt in 1969 can be explained in that context.
Her rejection of Mick can largely be explained as the aftermath of Redlands.
Marianne had been used as sex object once she entered the record industry. It was a role she didn’t reject apparently being a hot mama. But as one matures one finds ways to use as well as be used. Thus after 1969 Marianne turned predator using her sexual desirability to turn predator herself.
She stayed with Lord Rossmore after leaving Mick while she used Musker to regain some balance although kicking heroin is just a mirage junkies pursue. One grows weary of their stories of becoming ‘clean.’ At best after Musker she discovered her limits although she really tested them.
While I don’t think it’s true, Marianne felt that Mick was a superior musician to herself. Marianne let the notion destroy her self-confidence. Jagger is no singer, has no voice, is a mediocre lyricist, can’t dance but is a great showman with a burning desire to corrupt society.
Marianne’s problem was that she couldn’t find the proper agent or musical guide. Issuing four albums in 1965 was a crass error for which she was apparently responsible. She took no time to enter the spirit of the songs while many of the backing arrangements are revolting. Nevertheless she was Marianne.
Having felt herself overshadowed by Mick she now picked the poor shlub Ben to musically dominate and overshadow in revenge on Mick. As she left Musker she was emerging from the horrible reaction to Redlands while finding a musical persona to allow her to go on living the pop life she had learned to appreciate.
In keeping with her newly found myth combined with the Blake/Symbolist fantasy of plumbing the depths in search of the pearl of great price she embraced Brierly’s punk life style living in squalor in desperate squats. During this period she was forming the persona that would emerge with her 1979 release of Broken English. That record reestablished her musical credentials while providing her with a substantial cash windfall. She might as well have worked for nothing as she took a 90K check and promptly blew it on clothes and drugs. In some ways Marianne was a real slow learner.
She was able to disburse her cash faster than Edie Sedgwick threw away her 80K inheritance. Edie had no hopes for another windfall although Marianne did.
Broken English was a boundary line between the middle Marianne and what came after.
Marianne Soldiers On, A Real Trooper
Chapter IX will follow but I have other projects first.
A Review: Part III Tarzan And The Madman by Edgar Rice Burroughs
October 13, 2010
The Aquarian Archetype
The Renowned Arab Traveler- Mohammed Ibn Batuta
Writing in the fourteenth century Ibn Batuta had visited the East African coast trodding the soil of Kilwa Island on the southern border of Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Zanzibar replaced Kilwa as the Moslem trading entropot on the East Coast. Haggard apparently had done the same as he mentions ruins that dated back to before the tenth century. So, we have established commercial activity in Southern Africa before the arrival of the Shona people in Zimbabwe.
Ruiz stood behind a low, stone altar which appeared to have been painted a rusty brown red.For a long time Ruiz the high priest held the center of the stage. The rites where evidently of a religious nature that went on interminably. Three times Ruiz burned powder upon the altar. From the awful stench Sandra judged the powder must have consisted mostly of hair. The assemblage intoned a chant to the weird accompaniment of heathenish tom toms. The high priest occasionally made the sign of the cross, but it seemed obvious to Sandra that she had become the goddess of a bastard religion which bore no relationship to Christianity beyond the symbolism of the cross, which was evidently quite meaningless to the high priest and his followers.She heard mentioned several times Kibuka, the war god; and Walumbe the god of death, was often supplicated, while Mizimo departed spirits, held a prominent place in the chant and the progress. It was evidently a very primitive form of heathenish worship from which voodooism is derived.
Looking up, she saw a dozen naked dancing girls enter the apartment, and behind them two soldiers dragging a screaming Negro girl of about thirteen. Now the audience was alert, necks craned and every eye centered upon the child. The tom-toms beat out a wild cadence. The dancers, leaping, bending, whirling, approached the altar; and while they danced the soldiers lifted the still screaming girl and held her face up, upon its stained brown surface.The high priest made passes with his hands above the victim, the while he intoned some senseless gibberish. The child’s screams had been reduced to moaning sobs, as Ruiz drew a knife from beneath his robe. Sandra leaned forward in her throne-chair, clutching the arms, her wide eyes straining at the horrid sight below her.A deathly stillness fell upon the room broken only by the choking sobs of the girl. Ruiz’s knife flashed for an instant above his victim; and then the point was punged into her heart. Quickly he cut the throat and dabbing his hands in the spurting blood sprinkled it upon the audience, which surged forward to receive it…
“Well, what of it?’ demanded da Gama. “I am king. Do I not sit on a level with God and his goddess? I am as holy as they. I am a god as well as a king; and the gods can do no wrong.”“Rubbish!” exclaime the high priest. “You know a well as I do that the man is not a god, and the woman no goddess. Fate sent the man down from the skies- I don’t know how; but I’m sure he’s as mortal as you or I; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the church, for you know that who controls the church controls the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you conceived the idea of having a goddess, too, which you thought might double your power. Well, you have them; but they’re going to be just as useful to me as they are to you. Already, the people believe in them, and if I should go to them and say that you had harmed the god, they would tear you to pieces…”
“…you don’t stand any too well with the people, Chris, anyway; and there are plenty of them who think da Serra would make a better king.”“Sh-h-h,” cautioned da Gama. “Don’t talk so loud. Somebody may overhear you. But let’s not quarrel, Pedro. Our interests are identical. If Osorio da Serra becomes king of Alemtejo, Pedro Ruiz will die mysteriously; and Quesada the priest will become high priest. He might become high priest while I am king.”
“You should know,” he said. “You are a woman.”“I am not a mortal woman. I am a goddess.” She grasped at a straw.Rateng laughed at her. “There is no god but Allah.”“If you harm me you will die.” she threatened.“You are an infidel,” said Rateng, “and for every infidel I kill, I shall have greater honor in heaven.”
I, Dynamo 