Dave Stevens

Post date: 19-Apr-2021 17:54:45

Blah Blah Blah --- to insert DS -- Biog

[Oh yeah, dear Dave, I still owe you a biography. Difficult - you did so much in your life! PE]

FROM TONY BARNETT

Hi all, anyway Julius rang to ask if I'd watched Live 8 the pop concert> I hadn't.".What ! the Pink Floyd all those Sir Whatsits et al and Eric Dad it was like Fathers Day up there".

Yeah!

FROM DAVE STEVENS

Not a pop concert, but a ponce concert. How does St. Bob make a living? I don't want to know.

Why don't they all just club together and give their existing riches and future royalties to the deserving poor?

They claim to be raising awareness (not money) but that awareness is of themselves.

See attached review of Miles' book 'Hippie'.

BOOK REVIEW

by Dave Stevens

For American Book Review

Barry Miles, Hippie.

London: Cassell Illustrated, 2003

Paperback

ISBN 1-84403-269-8

Pp384, including index

New York: Sterling Publishers, 2004

Hardback

ISBN 1-4027-1442-4

Pp 384, including index

I hate the smell of patchouli in the morning. Hippies are scum. Those who now identify with this label, although no-one did then, float on recent media history. The association of the words ‘Hippie’ or ‘Hippy’ as it earlier appeared, with anything remotely ‘hip’ is laughable, as is the previous coinage of ‘Beat’, from which it emerged. These cultural epiphenomena were courtesy of ‘LIFE’ & TIME magazines, the definitive media for serious commentary on all things underground.

In 1959 a team from TIME/LIFE visited Paris to interview William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg for a photo-feature in which the ‘beat generation’ was born. Although at the time only a free lunch was scored by the principals, careers were made and headlines created. Muffled sniggers were soon spread widely through teenage bedrooms around the world, courtesy of MAD magazine, in its issue of September 1960. Jack Kerouac, whose poetic association of the word ‘beatific’ with ‘beat’, and whose legend gave birth to the freewheeling bum image (Cody/Dean Moriarty), which in the person of Neal Cassady made a real transition to the world of the sixties and seventies, on the road in Ken Kesey’s magic bus (destination ‘Further’) was not there even then, fearing foreign parts. Kerouac died, bloated by beer and addled with mother-love, at home. Beat and not hip. One could say the same about this book.

Miles has been a lynchpin of the literary scene in London, Europe, and the US since the early 1960s. Manager of Better Books, the first counter-culture bookshop on Charing Cross Road, co-founder of International Times with the photographer John Hopkins (Hoppy), with John Dunbar (at that time married to Marianne Faithfull) of Indica Bookshop and Gallery (where John met Yoko), a collaborator with Bill Burroughs and author of his definitive biography ‘William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible’, of ‘Ginsberg: A Biography’, ‘Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats’, ‘The Beat Hotel’ a definitive account of the Parisian crucible in which hip art was forged, and then ‘Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now’. Maybe this is where the rot set in.

As Miles makes clear in ‘Hippie’, McCartney was a great supporter and proponent of libertarian ideas, not least on dope. He got the Beatles to sign and pay for Steve Abrams’ full-page ‘Legalise Cannabis’ advert in the London Times, and when busted in Japan, stood up for it, proudly. He provided the space and facilities for Burroughs and Ian Sommerville to make their first experiments with tape cut-ups. Perhaps there’s a soul under that smarm. However, Miles seems to have been seduced, despite his long association with the counterculture, by the lure of record covers and pop posters, most of which fill this heavily illustrated volume and have little to do with any genuine underground movement to which the title nods.

One of the most celebrated figures of that era, Frank Zappa, who began his career writing and recording advertising jingles, came to London with the Mothers of Invention (who had just released their album ‘Freak Out’, a satire) to play at the Royal Albert Hall, and was invited to address the assembled revolutionary students sitting-in at an occupation of the London School of Economics, a popular habit in the late sixteies, at which I was present. To uproarious cheers he came to the lectern and then suggested that, since his audience was privileged to attend a world-renowned school, many of whose graduates would be destined for high-powered careers in government, finance, and international bodies, if they wished to change the world it would be best to do so by joining up with the ‘establishment’ and creating a revolution from the inside. He was booed of stage amid a blizzard of crumpled papers. A genuine counterculture hero.

What did the hippies contribute to civilization? Larger cigarette papers. Who were the moving figures? Businessmen. Hippies were entrepreneurs, from the lowliest panhandler, through the media hustlers, to the record company bosses with their phoney hair, Zapata moustaches, big collars and flared pants. How we reviled them and at the same time sucked up to them. After all, they were running the show, and dispensed pennies to keep alive the poor creeps who, without realising it, worked for them. Nobody got properly paid, and a lot of people got dumped. As a free-jazz saxophone player, hired to accompany a famous (and already rich) oriental performance artist associated with a more famous (but perhaps not so rich) Liverpool beat star, I and my band did two numbers at the London club ‘Middle Earth’; we weren’t paid. This was typical because, although people were happy to work or play for free (as I did for David Medalla’s ‘Exploding Galaxy’ dance troupe – see p.301), if money was promised you expected it. This same oriental performance artist is widely reported not to have paid up to others and even to have borrowed money from a babysitter without repayment. As Miles points out, these years (1965-71) saw the creation and epidemic of the rip-off. So, the rich stay rich, and the poor fools who go along with fantasies of social improvement get poorer. Miles’ book shows these fantasies in full color. Some of you may recognise yourselves in these pages. How quaint it all seems now.

The term ‘hippie’ had its first recorded use on the New York radio station WBAI in 1960, at the time when LIFE gave birth to the Beat Generation, to denote, pejoratively, the influx of suburban middle-class kids who dressed down to visit Greenwich Village; they were ‘hip wannabes’. On September 6, 1965, Michael Fallon first used the term in a San Francisco newspaper to describe the younger bohemians who, likewise, were following the image of the Beats, and on July 7, 1967, TIME magazine published a cover story on ‘The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture’.

George Harrison, tripping on a visit to Haight-Ashbury in August, 1967, saw, as Miles reports, a horde of ‘hideous, spotty little teenagers...terribly dirty and scruffy’, who then jeered him as he retreated to his limo. ‘I expected them all to own their own shops,...to be nice and clean and friendly and happy.’ Didn’t we all?

At the end of the ‘Summer of Love’ the Diggers, one of the few, original counterculture, communal, and hip groups to have preceded and survived this media and commercial onslaught held a ‘Death of Hippie’ parade through those very streets.

A friend, like George a pilgrim to India’s holy places in the hippy heyday, tells me that, as she sat by the burning ghats on the banks of the sacred river Ganges at Benares (now Varanasi), an Indian gentleman passed by and remarked about her ‘Oh! To think that the nation which produced Milton should come to this!’

Miles’ text, as erudite and stylish as ever, but the hardback weighs close to 5 and one half pounds (2.5 kilos), and if I were ‘flying into Los Angeles ... carrying a couple of keys’, I’d rather they were something more satisfying. The paperback, of which my copy has numerous pages in French which do not fit into the English text, is smaller, and consequently printed in 8-point type and as hard to read as footnotes. Perhaps this is just, since the hippies are little more than a footnote to history in the last century. Most of them, the great charlatans & con-men of those ‘liberation’ times are gone. Leary, Hoffman, Rubin, Graham, shucksters all. But it was fun, as Miles reminds us.

Jack Lee

London, 3.3.2005.

Revised 13. 5. 05.

Second revision 117. 6. 05.

Brief biography :

Cockney by birth, now an honorary citizen of the Republic of Texas, Lee is a graduate of the CIA Academy, and has been undercover in the London 'underground' for over forty years.

FROM PAUL TO DAVE

Oh harsh words indeed for the 'children of the revolution'.

We were all there at ALLy Pally with the exploding galaxy

for the bliss of mrs blossom!!!

Well Dave, I disagree. I was there at the beat hotel in

1961 and saw Burroughs - Corso was also staying there - but

I never bumped into him on my way up to my room, the

uppermost garret. Gabi stayed with me, as did Tony J. It

was Roger Silverman who introduced me to it - he had stayed

there in Summer 1960, when he was 15. Tony B and I went

back in 1962 and scored magical mescaline from the guy in

room number 1, which we took in Barcelona as is

commemorated in Gabi's painting on your wall! (Gabi was too

mean to buy any himself!!)

But when the hippie movement exploded around us

-- what was

the name of that NZ artist with a goatee who brought the

first acid to London in 1966? [John Esam] - Tony B and I used to supply

him with grass in Paris in 1963 (he was in some underground

fim with a title like chappaquiddick [Chappaqua 1967]- with Ornette Coleman

soundtrack) --

well it was great - the new clothes, the new music, Tibetan

Buddhism, Alistair Crowleymania, the Summer of Love - it

wasn't a challenge to our adolescent hipness - it was a

great cultural revolution - and we - the baby boom

generation who lived through the 1960s (and several didn't:

Tom Shonk, Alan Shoobridge, etc) -- still feel the nostalgic

surge of idealism and love through our battered veins

Don't forget that 'hip' came from sores on the hips from

lying down and habitually smoking O

The hippies were great - it was a time to tear down the old

barriers - to protest against normality, convention, and

the vietnam war, to grow your hair long, paint your body,

and wear lovely bright clothes

We all had to gow up - but many of our generation retain

that youthful idealism

.....

All you need is love ....... (and a good cure!)

Love is the law ... love under will

Paul