Hippie Hippie Shake

  HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE

  HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE

  the DREAMS, the TRIPS, the TRIALS,

  the LOVE-INS, the SCREW UPS ...

  THE SIXTIES

  RICHARD NEVILLE

  Published in 2009 by

  Duckworth Overlook

  LONDON

  90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF

  Tel: 020 7490 7300

  Fax: 020 7490 0080

  info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012

  © 1995, 2009 by Richard Neville

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  The right of Richard Neville to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  PICTURE SOURCES

  Doug Palmer: page 1 top

  Courtesy of Jill Neville: page 3 middle, 8 bottom right

  Evening Standard: pages 3 bottom right, 13 bottom, 21 top,

  Robert Whitaker: pages 3 bottom left, 4, 5 bottom, 6 main picture,

  7 top right, 8 bottom left, 14, 16

  Courtesy of Jenny Kee: page 9 top right

  Courtesy of Caroline Coon: page 18 top left

  Daily Mirror: page 20 bottom

  Courtesy of Felix Dennis: pages 19, 22, 23

  Courtesy of Martin Sharp: page 24 middle

  Supplied by Richard Neville: page 1, page 2 top and bottom right,

  3 top middle and right,5 top,8 top, 11 top, 15 top right,

  17 bottom, 18 middle, 20 top, 21 bottom, 24 bottom

  The Publishers would like to thank Martin Sharp for permission to use many of his illustrations which appear throughout the book. All remaining material taken from Oz magazines

  SONG LYRICS

  ‘I’m a Wild One’ by Johnny O’Keefe, courtesy of Southern Music: page 10

  ‘The Times They are A-changin’ by Bob Dylan, courtesy of Sony Music: pages 52, 327.

  ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysses’ by Martin Sharp and Eric Clapton, courtesy of Warner Chappel Music Ltd:

  pages 96, 114. ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen, courtesy of Polygram: pages 221-2.

  ‘God Save Oz’ by John Lennon, courtesy of EMI Music: page 273

  The publishers have made every effort to contact all holders of copyright work. All copyright holders who have not been contacted are invited to write to the publishers so that a full acknowledgement may be made in subsequent editions of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  from the Library of Congress

  Mobipocket ISBN: 978-0-7156-3955-9

  ePub ISBN: 978-0-7156-4036-4

  Adobe PDF ISBN: 978-0-7156-4037-1

  To everyone who was there, and their children.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue: The Exploding Tea Cosy

  1. The Happiest Nation on Earth

  2. My Chick’s Dynamite

  3. A Dirty Little Rag with Filth in it

  4. Non-stop Twisting and Stomping

  5. Mondo Katmandu

  6. In Bed with the English

  7. Ten Million Light Years Over the Milky Way

  8. Buttonholed Outside a Lav

  9. Revolution is the Ecstasy of History

  10. The Ice Caps are Melting, Harrods is Looted

  11. The Highest Ritual Expression of Our Faith

  12. A Warning to Every Parent

  13. Drowning in Sperm

  14. Everything into Mashed Potato

  15. Zen Dada

  16. No Room at the Inns

  17. Price of Admission – Your Mind

  18. Am I Waking You Up?

  19. A Millstone around His Neck

  20. The Wailing Wall of Weirdies

  21. Dancing to the Music of Time

  Epilogue: Midnight at the Oasis

  Afterword: The Fruits of Flower Power

  Author’s Note

  Fast Forward

  Index

  PREFACE

  For this new edition I have seized the chance to correct errors, update biographies and quicken the pace. At the request of the publishers I’ve added this preface and – talk about extracting blood from the stoned – provided an afterword: ‘The Fruits of Flower Power’.

  Fifty Years Ago Today

  In the early sixties a handful of Sydney students banded together in my family’s suburban home to hatch a plot against the Australian Government. The weapon was a little magazine and the gunpowder was satire. From the very first issue of Oz, published on April Fool’s Day, 1963, the Government hit back. Its weapon was the law and its mission was censorship. The local cop arrived with a summons at dawn, much to my father’s surprise. The subsequent trials served to boost sales and inflate the self-importance of the Oz crew – especially my own. A wilder version of Oz was later launched in London with spectacular results, climaxing in a trial at the Old Bailey. How do I feel now about the decade that never quite faded away?

  I don’t regret a single moment spent on a beach, on acid, in love, at the printers, in jail or throwing parties, though I am often shocked at the extent of my selfishness, sexism and self indulgence; and boy, did I spout some rubbish. ‘Yes,’ come the mutterings now from the next room, ‘he still does’. Having listened to one of my soapbox rants, a journalist likened it to being button-holed outside a lavatory. All the high-and-mighty moralising on the deceptions of government did not deter me from some shifty behaviour in the bedroom. Overall, I probably should have listened less to Bob Dylan and done more for Amnesty International. Yet it cannot be denied that heaps of fun was there for the taking, as we rolled around nude in vats of jelly, smoking pot and shaking our fists at the American Embassy. Okay, I’m not a hundred per cent sure about the jelly.

  What made the sixties stand out? The fact that they weren’t the fifties. My army officer dad arrived home from the Second World War ahead of everyone else and for once my mother was pleased to see him, which technically makes me Australia’s first baby boomer. Like many in the 1950s, I spent more time at school than at home. As the sixties approached, so did the waves of an information revolution – TV, rock ’n’ roll, cheap paperbacks. Bandstand, Chuck Berry, Jack Kerouac. It rattled the oldies and delighted the teenagers. In 1963, Australian Vogue called it a ‘youthquake’. Five years later, as students stormed the world’s capital cities, the media called it revolution. By 1973 it was fizzling out.

  For me, the era kicked off with an act of vanity. Having emerged too often from the barber with a strict military haircut, I decided to boycott them altogether. One day, bounding off the tram, I bumped into my father heading for the pub. He reeled back in surprise: ‘I thought you were a woman!’. We both laughed. In 1961 a shy Russian boy at university – now an esteemed architect – showed me a picture of the Beatles. ‘They’ve copied your hairstyle’, he said, and I felt smug.

  Student protest wasn’t all moan and groan against the war machine. The first demo I witnessed in Sydney was a bunch of students calling for the State government to let the architect Jùrn Utzon finish building the Sydney Opera House. But no, the politicians were so spooked by the challenge of concrete sails that Utzon was sent back to Denmark. These days there’s much wringing of hands that Utzon never returned to see the finished masterpiece.

  The counterculture evolved through several stages: student power, flower pow
er, people’s power. The Free Speech Movement leapt from the Berkeley campus in California soon after I left school, in response to the stifling of political discourse. This ignited a spirit of protest that helped transform the West. The Berkeley sit-ins coincided with anti-nuclear protests in London and encouraged students and academics in Sydney to protest against censorship and the oppression of the land’s original inhabitants.

  The war in Vietnam upped the stakes. Gung-ho politicians steeped in too many war movies imagined they were crushing a Third Reich. Such was the outcry from the youth that the warmongers were eventually overcome. It happened back then but it doesn’t happen so easily now. Even in the early seventies, protest still simmered. In Berkeley 30,000 demonstrators marched to rescue a community park from the jaws of developers, armed with flowers, peace signs and a huge banner: LET A THOUSAND PARKS BLOOM.

  Great. But what actually bloomed were parking lots.

  Three things lured me to London in the mid sixties: the pursuit of love, a thirst for fun and escape from stuffy ‘Downunder’. The love was squandered, the thirst was slaked and ‘Downunder’ has been upgraded. In September 1966, when I landed on my sister’s Notting Hill doorstep, the week-long ‘Destruction of Art Symposium’ was in full swing. The aim was to ‘link theoretical issues of destruction with actual destruction taking place in society’, according to the catalogue of Tate Britain’s 2006 retrospective, which listed the enemies of freedom as ‘planned obsolescence, popular media, pollution, urban sprawl and perpetual war’. In his performance piece 21st Action a blood-spattered Viennese artist, Hermann Nitsch, crucified a lamb and carved it up in front of projected images of a cow’s brains rubbing against a young man’s penis. All this passed me by, despite a furore and the police shutting down the event, because I was busy reuniting with my long-lost girlfriend, Louise Ferrier, who had earlier fled from Sydney (or maybe from me).

  Louise marched me off to Kings Road and Carnaby Street to acquire suitably swinging attire. But outside a few designated zones of grooviness, the streets of London seemed drab, the mood sombre, the food daggy. Even the BBC, despite Beatlemania, was largely deaf to the music of youth. Surely, I thought, there was more to rock culture than transients in bed-sits twiddling dials in search of the Rolling Stones? A new generation was taking off, but the bureaucrats still ran the city like a war veterans’ nursing home; lights out at 9.30 p.m. A new Prime Minister had appeared – Labour’s laid-back Harold Wilson – after the Tories were toppled in the wake of the Christine Keeler sex scandal, so at least the cultural wind was shifting. Satire crackled from the BBC and the pages of Private Eye; the aroma of pot wafted across dinner parties. It dawned on me that a London Oz could be launched in this subversive undercurrent. My mum came to regard this as the biggest mistake of my life.

  Numerous scoundrels were drawn to the ‘underground scene’: thieves; bullies; junkies; paedophiles. We were so busy trying to make the best of a moment we feared might be fleeting that our eyes were averted from the underground’s underworld. Perhaps it’s the fate of sociopolitical movements to kick off with passion and hope, gather steam, then hit the swamp: Theosophy; the Beats; casino capitalism. The first crack in the fairy cake was when the Hell’s Angels took control of security at rock concerts, which at the time I probably thought cool. The mantra shifted from ‘All You Need is Love’ to ‘Kill the Pigs’. For too long I had been a media darling, which led me to romanticise our intentions and exaggerate our impact. In truth, the underground press was often unreadable and underground movies were usually unwatchable. As for free love, it was rarely free of repercussions. At one point, VD was almost a status symbol. When a number of young ladies collapsed with salpingitis I was forced to face up to the dark side of hippiedom – which I did with a rant in Oz: ‘All God’s Children Got the Clap’.

  Just as I was getting cranky with the counterculture, the police swooped on Schoolkids Oz, so I was compelled to crank myself up and dwell on the movement’s brighter side. The long-running Oz trial was both a victory for free speech and the end of an era. In Camille Paglia’s words, ‘Life was deconstructed, taken to extreme and ended up hitting reality’. In this memoir there are scenes, people and events that teeter on the brink of madness – and perhaps tumble headlong into it. No, it wasn’t just the dope, it was the zeitgeist. By the early seventies, many felt exhausted and disillusioned, choked on excess, racked with ennui. When punk came along it was almost a relief, and I drifted elsewhere, remaining intrigued and excited by personalities and ideas that offered alternatives to the nauseating materialism that still grips so many, though it’s a grip that may, finally, be loosening.

  Today we are still haunted by the perils enumerated at the Destruction of Art Symposium, perhaps even more so. When it comes down to it, major Western powers are the destruction artists of our time, trashing nature, ignoring treaties, whittling away at human rights. Assassination, torture, rendition – who would have thought? Fifty years ago it was round-the-clock B52s pulverizing Vietnam, and – in secret – Cambodia. Henry Kissinger is still at large. Today’s Pol Pots of the sky rain death upon mud hut children from the safety of a base in Nevada. ‘Sitting in a virtual cockpit is not as exciting as flying a fighter jet,’ lamented a Drone pilot on CNN, but ‘watching targets on the screen get dispatched, and then going down to the Taco Bell for lunch, it’s kind of surreal’. It’s also kind of murder.

  Every so often in history, the hubris of our political masters escalates to the point of insanity. Is this such a time? On rare occasions citizens penetrate the Matrix and deconstruct the illusions, the horrors committed in our name. On a subliminal level, the sixties generation sensed that the only way to break the spell afflicting our leaders was to enter into a deeper realm of madness, to become crazy enough to shock the old farts into re-activating their humanity. We fought pigheadedness with outrageousness. In the end it did the trick.

  But not forever. Now the old farts are back, including many of those who were once touched by flower power, but who have weirdly come to believe that realpolitik, invasions, lies and war crimes are the best way to give peace a chance. In an age of meltdowns, we cannot unleash terror, repair ecosystems and eradicate poverty all at the same time. Despite evidence to the contrary, politicians, bankers, tycoons and generals are still prone to believing they are masters of the universe. Maybe it’s time to go crazy ape bonkers again.

  Richard Neville 2009

  PROLOGUE:

  the EXPLODING TEA COSY

  The screws took me from the hospital wing to a block of barred cubicles in the Wandsworth prison yard – the ‘pig pens’. They locked me inside with a sack of my street clothes – purple velvet bell-bottoms, a tight yellow T-shirt and a waistcoat like a crocheted tea cosy. It was 5 August 1971.

  The Black Maria was about to take the three of us back to the Old Bailey, for the last act of a trial we had managed to turn into a media circus: the defendants in gym slips, street theatre, Groucho Marx invited to testify as a witness, and a touch of reefer madness in the dock.

  The jury had found that a special issue of Oz was obscene. Today the judge would invite me to offer a ‘plea of mitigation’ before he passed sentence. What could I say?

  Please, Your Lordship, we’re just a bunch of freaks whipping up a revolution for the hell of it – aiming for world peace, acid in the drinking water and orgasms on demand – no big deal..

  I climbed out of the grey prison pyjamas and threw on my hippie tat; then I was loaded into the van with my friends and fellow editors, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, and a batch of conmen, hitmen and rapists.

  The van disgorged us into the subterranean cells of the Old Bailey. Guards led us upstairs to the dock, and I racked my brains. The mahogany room hushed as we entered; a blur of familiar faces, as though we three were the stars in This Is Your Life. But there was no applause, only shocked gasps at our prison haircuts. I looked like a monkey.

  The defence solicitor breasted the dock. ‘Your last chance to ke
ep out of jail, boys. Watch your tongue.’ Judge Argyle peered over his pince-nez and called on the experts from the Home Office.

  The doctor rose and said we were fit. The psychiatrist rose and said we were sane. The probation officer rose and said we found society riddled with injustice and couldn’t care less about material gain.

  Was there remorse? ‘No, your Lordship, not really. The defendants are proud of Oz.’ The judge asked if I had anything to say before sentence.

  ‘If you jail us today, your Lordship, you will show the world that your generation – while it appears to listen with every courtesy – is in fact deaf.’

  John Mortimer QC, acting for Felix and Jim, addressed the court with the crumpled intimacy of the character later to achieve renown on TV as Rumpole of the Bailey. ‘Don’t turn these young men into martyrs, my Lord. This would be foolish.’

  The judge asked what guarantee I could give about the future.

  ‘I’m tired of Oz,’ I said, ‘but I wish to retain my right to publish . . .’

  ‘In that case, I have no alternative but to sentence you to fifteen months’ imprisonment and to recommend that you be deported.’

  The public gallery erupted. People screamed and jeered at the judge as I was shoved downstairs. A prisoner asked, ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifteen months.’

  ‘Christ. That’s what I got. And I tried to murder my wife.’

  Jim and Felix were pushed into the cell, looking dazed, jailed for twelve and nine months. An old-timer remarked, ‘It’s like being hit by a sledge-hammer – you won’t wake up for a week.’

  The sergeant took me up to the visitors’ room. ‘You can find more porno in Soho,’ he said, ‘than what’s in the pages of Oz.’ My girlfriend Louise stood there, so beautiful, on the other side of the bars. I tried not to sniffle.

  ‘It’s incredible outside,’ Louise said. ‘A riot. Smoke bombs going off, stink bombs.’ She held up the first editions – OZ 3 JAILED – which pictured our supporters swarming around an effigy of the judge. ‘It’s like Guy Fawkes,’ she said. ‘Amazing.’