Barry Miles is a writer, luminary of the 1960s underground and businessman. Miles has written biographies of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg, in addition to books on The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Clash as well as London Calling, a general history of London’s counter-culture since 1945.
adventures in the counter-culture
to Rosemary – met in the seventies
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Barry Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2011 Barry Miles
All rights reserved. No part of this book 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.
First published in 2011 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
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Introduction
1 1970 Off with a bang
2 1970 Allen Ginsberg’s hippy commune
3 1970 The summer people
4 1970 Chelsea days
5 1971 The golden west
6 1971 Big Sur
7 1971 Desert days
8 1972 With William Seward Burroughs in St James’s
9 1972 A condition of treason
10 1973 A visit to Wilhelm Reich’s Orgonon
11 1973 Harry Smith at the Chelsea
12 1973 The Mercer Street Arts Theater
13 1974 Bananas
14 1976 Rock ’n’ roll
15 1976 Punk
16 1978 On the Bowery
Afterword
Index
The seventies are now more than thirty years ago – you need to be middle aged to properly remember them – and as they recede in time, just as the sixties did and the decades before that, the decade is taking on its own stereotype: a weird mixture of flares, Abba, punk, pornography and super-heavy drug use. All those elements were there, but I saw most of the seventies as an extension of the sixties; in fact for me, the sixties as a definable period of cultural history ran from 1963 until 1977: from the Beatles until the end of punk. It’s not as convenient as a nice, easy, even-numbered decade but it encompasses the growth and collapse of a movement.
Journalist Peter Braunstein described the seventies as ‘the last sexually free decade of the twentieth century’ and he is right; in fact most of the excess attributed to the sixties occurred during the seventies: if there was ever a golden age of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll this was it. Beginning with David Bowie in drag, and ending with Grace Jones naked at Studio 54, it was the era of massive cocaine use, of legal pornographic films, and fashions that even now no one has seriously attempted to revive.
This book is a continuation of my previous volume, In the Sixties, where I concentrated on underground, counter-cultural activities, mostly in London. That book described the 1965 Albert Hall Reading, the UFO Club, Indica Books and Gallery, the founding of International Times and the Beatles’ spoken-word label Zapple. Indica Books closed in February 1970 (the gallery closed in 1967), but International Times continued until 1974 – and flourished again later – and I continued to write for it, mostly reporting from New York.
My interest in the Beat Generation continued and this volume covers the time I spent on Allen Ginsberg’s hippy commune in upstate New York, working with him in Berkeley, and cataloguing William Burroughs’ archives in London. I also continued my rock ’n’ roll journalism, this time at New Musical Express, where for several years I covered everyone from the Pink Floyd to the Clash, Brian Eno to Talking Heads. I spent much of this time in New York, reporting from CBGBs on the Bowery then, in 1978, I edited Time Out, the weekly London arts and entertainment listing magazine for a spell. It was a busy decade, I was privileged to work with some of the people I admired most in life, and at the end of it I finally figured out what I wanted to do with my life, which was to become a writer. The book opens in New York, where Sue, my first wife, and I had gone to recover from sixties London.
The south side of tree-lined West 11th Street at Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village is lined with elegant Greek Revival brownstones built in 1845, served by the sombre First Presbyterian church, across the street, built a year later, and set well back from Fifth Avenue. The house at number 18 was part hidden by a tall wooden fence until five minutes before midday on 6 March 1970, when a powerful explosion ripped open the whole front of the building. Flames were already billowing from the windows when two more blasts followed in quick succession. Clouds of dust billowed across the street, slabs of wall and flooring crushed the roofs of parked cars and filled the front yard and street, blocking the road and sidewalk.
Two dazed girls covered in soot staggered from the flames; one was completely naked, her clothes blown off by the blast, the other wore blue jeans. They were trembling and in shock. Part of the front wall crashed to the street, narrowly missing them, engulfing them in dust and smoke. By this time neighbours had begun to arrive and one of them, Susan Wager, the former wife of film actor Henry Fonda, quickly pulled them down the street to her house at number 50 and into her living room. The girls were shaking and unable to speak but they seemed physically uninjured so she took them upstairs to the bathroom and found fresh clothes for them to wear. She asked her housekeeper to make coffee for them, then returned to the burning building in case there were further casualties.
A crowd was gathering and the first of the emergency vehicles arrived, red lights revolving, radios crackling with static. Sirens and klaxons could be heard, converging on the block from all directions. Soon the street was blocked off by police lines of blue and white wooden trestles and bundles of throbbing fire hoses that snaked along the gutters. As the roof caved in, neighbours began to evacuate the nearby houses, among them Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door and left carrying a valuable Tiffany lamp. Mrs Wager returned to her house to check on the girls but they were gone, having told the housekeeper they were going to the drugstore to get some medicine.
The fire department quickly brought the fire under control and began damping down to make the structure safe to enter. Early in the evening the body of a man was found in the basement in pieces, and not long afterwards, the horribly mangled torso of a woman was discovered on the remnants of the ground floor. Police also found a number of handbags containing college IDs stolen from students in recent months. By now they were less convinced that the explosion was the result of a ruptured gas main. Floodlights were set up and late that same night police found more than sixty sticks of dynamite, a live military anti-tank shell, blasting caps and a number of large metal pipes packed tight with explosives. The neighbouring houses were evacuated. The police had discovered a Weathermen bomb factory.
The search continued. Using his fingerprints, police identified the dead man as Theodore Gold, one of the leaders of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University. He was twenty-three years old and a member of the Weathermen. The remains of the dead woman were identified only by the print on a severed finger. She was Diana Oughton, the granddaughter of the founder of the Boy Scouts of America and daughter of an Illinois state politician. After seven days of painstaking searching through the rubble the police located the body of another male, impossible to identify as only the torso remained. The Weathermen later gave him a name; it was Terry Robbins, one of their members. He had been blown to pieces when he accidentally ignited the six sticks of dynamite he was wiring up.
The house at 18 West 11th Street belonged to James P. Wilkerson, the owner of a Midwest radio station. His daughter, twenty-five-year-old Cathlyn Wilkerson, was home on $20,000 bail for her part in the Days of Rage protest the previous autumn when a group of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members armed with baseball bats and wearing helmets to protect themselves from police batons vandalised shopfronts along Chicago’s Gold Coast. One of her best friends, Kathy Boudin, had been released on $40,000 bail after hitting a police officer with her club during the same action. Kathy was staying with Cathlyn at West 11th Street at the time of the blast.
They were both known members of the Weathermen, the breakaway radical arm of the SDS. These were the two women who escaped, unharmed, from the blast. The bombs were intended to ‘bring the war home’ by blowing up a non-commissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, an action that would undoubtedly have resulted in many deaths. Two weeks earlier, on 19 February, the Weathermen had caused explosions in three New York office buildings and at buildings in California, Washington State, Maryland and Michigan. After the debacle of the town house explosion, the Weathermen never again attempted an action that would harm human life. Cathlyn Wilkerson remained underground for ten years before turning herself in. She served eleven months of a three-year sentence for negligent homicide in connection with the explosion. Kathy Boudin stayed on the loose until 1981 when she was captured as a participant in the hold-up of a Brinks armoured truck in which two cops and a security officer were killed. She received a prison term of twenty years to life and was released on parole in September 2003.
At the time of the explosion I was staying with my then wife, Sue, at a friend’s apartment on the eighth floor of 51 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 11th Street, just ten doors from number eighteen. I remember the piles of rubble, the police lines blocking the street and the shockingly exposed interior of the house, visible through the gaping hole of what was once its front. The odd thing is that I cannot remember whether I was there when the explosion happened or not; it is possible that I only flew in from London the next day.
I was writing about the New York counter-cultural scene for International Times, the London underground paper that I had helped to found back in 1966, and my fact-gathering and reporting of events, and my actual memories, have become entangled as one. It poses an interesting question about authenticity; was I there or did I just hear about it? I certainly remember the aftermath, the closed street and the emergency vehicles. It is rather like the childhood memories of events that you only remember because parents have described them so often; are they real memories or received information? There is an element of this in this book; sometimes I have added factual details to give an event context, but it is all a first-person memoir.
I arrived in New York exhausted after years of close involvement with the London underground scene: running Indica Bookshop, on the editorial board of International Times, writing regular book reviews and record review columns as well as articles for IT, Oz and many US and European underground newspapers, working as label manager of the Beatles experimental Zapple label, and producing a dozen spoken-word albums. It was with a sense of relief that I had taken up Allen Ginsberg’s kind offer for me to come over and catalogue his tape archive, an open-ended job that could easily take a year. Indica, the bookshop I started back in 1965 with John Dunbar and Peter Asher, had finally closed on 29 February; I resigned from the various companies that had been set up to manufacture and sell psychedelic posters, sublet the flat, and Sue and I set off for Manhattan.
The grim reality of the political situation in America was brought forcefully home to us by the explosion on East 11th. At the beginning of the seventies America was a society divided; opposition to the Vietnam War was at its height and the right-wing establishment was using all its powers to crush the anti-war, pro-youth counter-culture; in fact it sometimes seemed that America regarded all college students or any young person with long hair as the enemy. The hippies were becoming radicalised. It was a time of huge demonstrations, and of violent political activism.
Many of the central figures of the counter-culture were in jail or being harassed by the police. John Sinclair, the leader of the Detroit White Panther Party, was jailed for ten years for possession of one joint, having been set up by narcs posing as hippies. On 19 February, Timothy Leary was convicted for possession of two roaches (probably belonging to his daughter) and also held in custody. For some time the police had been looking for a way to contain Leary, who was seen as something of a loose cannon; an establishment figure gone bad. Allen Ginsberg sent the judge at Leary’s trial in Santa Ana, California, a telegram: ‘Pray release the pioneer psychologist Dr Timothy Leary on normal bond till sentencing. He is considered by many good people to hold honourable if controversial opinions and it is not useful to deny bond and abruptly jail so famous a theorist for his unpopular views – such an imprisonment is proper neither to science nor jurisprudence. Allen Ginsberg – Guggenheim fellow poet / National Arts Letter grantee.’ He was ignored, of course, and like Sinclair, Tim was given a ten-year sentence. On 11 March Leary was denied appeal bail as ‘an insidious influence’ and sent to Vacaville State Penitentiary for processing.
Meanwhile, the great Chicago Conspiracy trial was still playing itself out. The Youth International Party (Yippies), in collaboration with the National Mobilization Committee (MOBE), had organised a series of demonstrations to take place during the Democratic Party National Congress in Chicago in August 1968. The Yippie role was to sponsor a ‘Festival of Life’ during the convention and in March that year they applied to the Chicago Parks department for an application to hold demonstrations as was their democratic right. Then on 5 August, only three weeks before the convention and with thousands of young people planning to attend the Yippie festival, Deputy Mayor Stahl decided not to grant permits to allow sleeping in the parks.
Despite the efforts of the Civil Liberties Union, the city refused to budge, and on 22 August, MOBE organisers warned them it would be ‘suicide’ not to allow demonstrators to sleep in the parks; it was just asking for a confrontation. The next day, as cops tacked up ‘11 p.m. curfew’ signs on the park trees, MOBE and the Yippies began training demonstrators in karate, snake dancing and other forms of self-defence. They needed it because on the 25th there was a police charge. People attending a concert in Lincoln Park were clubbed to the ground by their nightsticks and the next night police, with their nametags removed to avoid prosecution, attacked about three thousand people in the park with clubs and tear gas. The violence culminated on the 28th when the police ran riot, beating up everyone: demonstrators, spectators, the press, innocent bystanders, and CBS cameramen, all live on national television. The plate-glass window of the Hilton Hotel was pushed in and cops ran inside and began beating up people in the lobby, including members of the international press. The thin veneer of the American police state had finally cracked and middle-class Americans were shocked.
Then the long legal proceedings began: a federal grand jury indicted the ‘Chicago Eight’ in March 1968 and in September the trial began under Judge Julius Hoffman. The trial was a travesty of justice. Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had arrived in Chicago only two days before the convention and who had no part at all in the planning of the demonstrations, was ordered to be bound in chains and gagged because of his courtroom outbursts demanding to represent himself. Eventually, on 5 November, his trial was severed from that of the others but not until the American public had seen the sorry spectacle of a black man, bound and gagged, sitting before the all-white court.
On 18 February, the jury found five of the seven defendants guilty of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 and Hoffman gave them all jail sentences as well as additional time for contempt of court. Even their lawyers were given several years in prison for contempt. (The contempt convictions, including those of their lawyers, were reversed by the Seventh Circuit Criminal Court of Appeals on 11 May 1972, and the convictions themselves were reversed on 21 November 1972.) The sentences provoked fury across the nation, with many college campuses erupting with spontaneous demonstrations. There was a riot at Isla Vista, California, followed up on 25 February by a violent demonstration during which the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America was burned to the ground by college students from UC Santa Barbara. This prompted California governor Ronald Reagan to comment on the subject of student unrest: ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.’
This was a prescient remark as a month later, on 4 May, on the campus of Kent State University, Ohio, National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed students, killing four of them. Two of them were only walking to their classes; naturally no one was prosecuted. Ten days later, police killed two more students, this time at Jackson State College during violent student demonstrations against Nixon and Kissinger sending American troops into Cambodia. Astonishingly, the killings at Kent State met with wide approval from patriotic right-wing Americans, and two days later New York construction workers, their hard hats adorned with American flags, attacked an anti-war demonstration on Wall Street, screaming and yelling obscenities. Even the Spanish waiters at the El Coyote restaurant attached to the Hotel Chelsea showed their patriotism by putting little American flags on the tables; something that provoked several bad-tempered rows when Chelsea residents drew swastikas on them or set them on fire.
It was against this increasingly polarised background that Allen Ginsberg, Sue and I, attended the Holding Together benefit for Leary held at the Village Gate in mid-May, where Allen was to perform. Self-appointed youth leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both high on acid, seized the microphone and denounced Allen as ‘a CIA agent’ and the organisers of the benefit as ‘half CIA’, which seemed a bit feeble.
‘They’ll never let Leary out,’ screamed the flushed, wild-eyed Hoffman, a dirty bandana tied round his head. ‘You’re looking for a religious martyr but this is a political revolution and he is a prisoner of war – a political prisoner!’ Allen stood to the side of the stage, also sweating, looking worried and confused as the Hoffman–Rubin circus roared out of control. With us were a number of Allen’s friends, including Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, his French translators, who were clearly confused; they regarded both Leary and Hoffman–Rubin as counter-cultural spokesmen, and now they didn’t know which side to support.
It seemed pretty obvious to me that the already massive egos of Hoffman and Rubin had been so inflated by all the media attention that the trial and sentencing received that they really did think they were revolutionary leaders. But they represented no one, they were not in any organised political party, they had no constituency. They were leaders only in their own eyes and that of the media, who loved their pranks. As their two enormous egos buffeted around the room like weather balloons, squeezed into the remaining space, present to support Leary, were Fernanda Pivano, the Italian translator of Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beats, and her husband, the celebrated designer Ettore Sottsass. Ettore happily took photographs; his English wasn’t up to following the arguments and he very sensibly saw it all as a media spectacle. Having spent much of the Second World War in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia, he was not overly impressed by these wild antics; to him they were merely playing at politics. Jimi Hendrix played a fine set backed by Johnny Winter, whom I knew from the Hotel Chelsea where he lived. Jim Morrison was supposed to be there, presumably to read poetry, but if he was I missed him.
Although I was already organising Allen Ginsberg’s tape archive, in preparation for listing and cataloguing it all, I did not want to stop writing for the underground press. I filed regular stories with International Times back in London and began working for Crawdaddy magazine, one of the first underground music mags, then edited by Peter Stafford. Peter saw the mag as being about rock culture, rather than directly tied to rock itself. He thought music would fill only about half of its pages. His guiding principle was to make the reader wonder: ‘What the fuck is Crawdaddy up to?’
The editorial offices were in the sub-basement of a cast-iron office block at 510 Sixth Avenue on the corner of 13th Street. The ground floor housed a huge store selling scented candles, joss sticks, tie-dye clothing and hippy paraphernalia on a vast scale. The patchouli oil caught in your throat as you walked in the door. The basement was used for storage and offices and below that was one vast room, the ceiling supported by dozens of metal columns. On one wall was a huge metal door with a complicated metal lock, like in a submarine, that led through to the subway on the other side; we were on a level with the tracks and could hear the trains thunder by. Most of the room was empty, but huddled in one corner, in a pool of fluorescent light, was the group of desks that constituted Crawdaddy.
In another corner, far away across the gloom, were more desks in another pool of light; this was where the New York Review of Sex was produced, one of the sex papers that started around the same time as Al Goldstein’s Screw. There was something wrong about the whole set-up, and the way the paper was printed gave a few clues.
When the boards were ready, some large Italian men would come and collect them. A few days later, the magazine was on the stands. We did not know who printed it, or where, or how many. Our job was to fill the paper, and in this we had complete freedom. I wrote regularly for Crawdaddy for six months, then one day Peter called the staff together for a meeting. ‘I am not sure that the wage cheques are going to be paid this week,’ he told us. ‘I understand that an IBM Selectric goes for pretty good money these days. I am going to take a walk around the block and I do hope no one steals any of our typewriters while I’m gone.’ I took a nice fire-engine red one back to the Chelsea, along with a couple of different golf-balls, and eventually shipped it to London. I later got to know Bob Salpeter, who helped design the first IBM ad campaign for the Selectric. His ad read: ‘Our typewriters are different. They’ve got balls!’ They fired him of course.
Cherry Valley in upstate New York was first settled in 1740. It remained a village of just two streets, slowly acquiring a hotel, a feed store, bank and, of course, several churches as well as a scattering of traditional white clapboard houses with porches. The most memorable event in its history was the Cherry Valley Massacre of 9 November 1778, when the Tory, Walter N. Butler, led a force of Rangers and Six Nations Indians behind American lines to attack the village. They left behind forty-six corpses: sixteen soldiers from the Cherry Valley garrison and thirty-two settlers, mostly women and children, tomahawked and scalped by the Seneca Indians, who were looking to avenge the destruction of three of their villages by the Americans. White settlers subsequently seized the land from the Indians, who are now restricted to a few small reservations, but their invisible presence is still felt in the place names: Oneida, Oneonta, Mohawk, Sauquoit, Canajoharie and nearby Otsego Lake, headwater of the Susquehanna river, a name I’d known from American folk songs and ballads but had never identified as a real place. It leaves Otsego Lake at Coopers-town, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Allen Ginsberg showed me around the Hall of Fame. We saw Babe Ruth’s shirt and baseball bat; baseballs autographed by long-ago batsmen and pitchers, and a huge collection of colourful pennants. Allen explained the rules and history of baseball in a loud voice until several visitors, after forcefully frowning and glaring at him to no effect, acted in unison and asked him to be quiet. They informed him, somewhat bluntly, that his understanding of the game was faulty on numerous counts. These they then elucidated in rather more detail than Allen and I would have ideally liked. Despite such erudition, it still seemed like rounders to me, a game that in England is played only by schoolgirls, along with hockey, lacrosse and other violent sports.
Allen was suitably subdued; however, he soon perked up at the Cooperstown Farmers’ Museum, an extraordinary collection of a dozen houses, brought together from a 100-mile radius, and ranging in age from 1795 to 1829: a country store, a printing office, a schoolhouse, farm and so on, all moved from their original locations to be reassembled to make a new ‘historic’ village. At the Farmers’ Museum Allen was on firmer ground, explaining the story of James Fennimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking Tales, whose father founded the town. I had read The Last of the Mohicans when I was a child and it was wonderful to see the Glimmerglass Lake itself; you could almost see the Indians in their canoes, moving silently among the reeds at the bank. This of course would have been very unlikely as the lake is now completely dead so there are no fish to catch. The poisoned water is crystal clear, bereft even of algae.
Many of the people in Cooperstown had pointed Allen out in loud whispers. This was the period of his most intense political activity and consequently of his greatest public fame: he was frequently on television and in the newspapers and, with his balding pate, long black hair curling over his collar, and large Whitmanesque beard, thick black-rimmed glasses, dark work clothes and baggy jeans, he was easily recognisable. His move to upstate New York had been the subject of much gossip in Cherry Valley and the surrounding villages.
The Poetry Farm was five miles from Cherry Valley on East Hill, and stood in 99 acres of pasture, which sloped down to a river, beyond which was state forest. The Seneca name for Cherry Valley was Karightongegh, meaning ‘Oak Woods’, but the ancient forest had been logged many years before and now consisted entirely of characterless second- or third-growth pine. At the top of the meadow the land was bordered by trees, which sheltered the tarpaper shack where Ed the Hermit lived; you could sometimes see the flash of sun on his field glasses as he spied on the girls bathing in the fishpond below the barn. The land was first settled by a family called Millson and their gravestones stood next to the house, in a grove of saplings behind the propane tank. The white-painted wooden farmhouse had a crude stone-lined storm cellar, and consisted of a large kitchen-dining room and a living room, the two divided by a staircase. Above that were four bedrooms and a large high-ceilinged attic. There was another ground-floor room off the porch. Next to the house stood a traditional red and white painted barn and various lean-tos for the goats and chickens.
When Sue and I arrived in late May 1970, the occupants were Allen Ginsberg, then aged forty-three; his lover Peter Orlovsky; Peter’s twenty-year-old girlfriend Denise Mercedes, who was sixteen years younger than him; Peter’s catatonic elder brother Julius Orlovsky, rescued from the mental hospital; farm manager Gordon Ball; Beat poet Ray Bremser; his wife Bonnie and their three-year-old daughter Georgia; Lash the horse; Bessie Smith and Jennifer the cows, plus one unnamed calf; three goats: Shiva, Junior and Rama; three dogs: Godley, Radah and Mirabelle; one nameless white rabbit; two cocks and thirty hens; ten ducks; three cats: George, Tiger and Blackie, and one gerbil called Geoffrey. The previous year the farm had been home to a pair of African geese, male and female, but they were so aggressive that they had to be sent away before they really hurt someone; their speciality was pecking the buttocks of rapidly retreating guests. They could deliver a painful nip.
The winter of 1969/70 was the first time that Allen had tried to live there year round. Gordon Ball and Peter Orlovsky had panelled the walls with insulation behind tongue-and-groove pine boards to ‘winterise’ the building, as they put it, but it was still bitterly cold when the freezing winds and snow came. It must have been a harsh existence for the original farmers. I was surprised by the building’s flimsy, unsubstantial construction; in Europe it would have been built of stone throughout.
Early in February a bathroom was built off the kitchen to replace the outhouse, which had become a major point of contention. Each week someone was elected to empty the bucket beneath the smooth wooden seat but many people refused and it was usually Allen himself who did it. The only source of water had been a clanking green-painted hand pump in the kitchen sink, but now a deep well had been dug below the house down to the spring to install a complicated gravity pump which used the weight of many cups of water to force one cup of water up the hill to a storage reservoir above the house. Seventy times an hour there was a reassuring click in the pipes, which confirmed that the system was working and that the Poetry Farm was equipped with running water. Cooking was done with the aid of a large propane gas tank to the side of the house, and there was a telephone; Ma Bell was compelled by law to provide a service no matter how remote.
Unfortunately it was a party line, and Allen used it so often that his neighbours sometimes became exasperated at not being able to get through. Most days Allen spent an hour or two, sitting uncomfortably on a little child’s chair, just inside the kitchen door, his knees in the air, fingers dialling, his voluminous address book open on his lap; calling the New York Times to complain about something in that day’s Op-Ed page, raising support for this group or that, arranging readings, translations, visitors and finances. I never understood why he didn’t replace it with a normal-size chair.
One major convenience lacking on the farm was electricity. I knew the farm was too remote to be connected to mains electricity but I’d assumed they used a generator for refrigeration and to power Peter’s television, but this was not the case. A generator was considered polluting and unecological; I was told it would disturb the peaceful atmosphere and produce fumes, but surely no more than the clapped-out 1959 Ford Galaxy and ’56 Oldsmobile 88 that chugged up and down the driveway emitting clouds of blue smoke. Allen’s cousin, who worked in Mayor Lindsay’s office, offered to get him a generator at a discount through the city, but Allen was adamant.
Miles Collection
Peter and Denise used car batteries to power a specially converted television in their bedroom off the porch and Allen would sometimes join them there to watch the news. Denise was not too keen on the other guests visiting; she wanted to have her own space. She had been with Peter only since October and it was hardly a conventional relationship; for a start Peter and Allen were still on-off lovers. Since my reason for being there was to catalogue and edit Allen’s huge collection of tape-recorded readings it was immediately clear that I would have to start by devising an electricity supply.
In 1969 I had produced an album of him singing William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to tunes that he had composed himself; we know that Blake sang them, but the music was not preserved, if it was ever written down at all. Allen had become very interested in audio recording and, in a wonderful act of kindness, he had recognised that I was exhausted from my life in London so he had invited me to spend a season on the farm, editing his tapes into shape, with a view to releasing them as a ten-album boxed set through Fantasy Records in Berkeley.
We knew there were undoubtedly some gems hidden in the tape boxes as he had material going right back to the forties, including some reels on paper tape, which Allen was sure contained a recording of a sex orgy with Jack Kerouac. These I carefully restored, repairing all the tears with splicing tape, but when we played them through, to Allen’s chagrin, there was no orgy, just poorly recorded table talk.
We did, however, find a 1952 recording of Allen reading his poems in a T. S. Eliot voice at Neal Cassady’s house in San Jose, as well as the famous 1960 Big Table reading in Chicago with Gregory Corso, and the notorious Los Angeles reading where he took his clothes off in front of Anaïs Nin, described by Lawrence Lipton in his book The Holy Barbarians. Our intention was to find the best reading of each of Allen’s published poems, but as the quality of recording was often terrible, we also had to take fidelity into account. It was a long job, but first of all I had to listen to all of the tapes – 300 of them – and catalogue which poems were on each. If they were recorded on ‘one side’ only, I would insert leader tape between each poem so that we could find it again easily.
A system was rigged up to power my tape machines from car batteries but this was obviously inefficient as they needed to be charged up twice a week, and that meant carrying them out to the car and driving over to Myron’s place where the friendly local farmer would charge them overnight ready for collection the next day. Peter had the big powerful physique of a Russian peasant and the heavy batteries were no problem for him to carry around, but it was a waste of his time. If I was to spend the summer editing Allen’s tapes we had to get a proper power supply.
At the end of the sixties, young people began leaving the cities to set up communes, to grow organic vegetables, and attempt a self-sufficient life outside the consumer society. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was an immensely popular counter-cultural alternative to the Sears-Roebuck Catalog; it provided everything eco-warriors could possibly need to live the alternate lifestyle. It was here we found a suitable windmill to generate our own electricity. Allen could not afford to buy a full-size windmill, capable of providing enough power for lights and a fridge, so we settled for a small unit that we hoped would power my tape machines with a bit left over for the hi-fi. The rickety barn was not strong enough to withstand the stress of a vibrating windmill so it was decided to build one above the wellhead where the gravity pump was installed. A DC cable could then lead down the well to an AC converter and car batteries which would be stored down next to the pump, below the frost line.
I had produced Allen’s William Blake album at Apostolic Studios in New York and one of their engineers, Paul Berkowitz, now came up to help out. Paul and I built a six-foot wooden frame as a foundation for the windmill’s metal tower. We creosoted it into the ground, ruining a good blue shirt of mine, and bolted together the tower, like building with a Meccano set as a child. I had not done any physical labour like this – apart from humping boxes of books around – for many years and it felt very good. The generator was attached directly to the propeller at the top of the tower. To prevent power simply feeding back from the batteries on the circuit and driving the windmill on calm days instead of storing its energy, Paul inserted a diode into the loop. He also assembled the AC/DC converter, which, like the windmill, arrived in kit form from an address in the Whole Earth Catalog.
Paul and I were both too weedy for heavy digging so Gordon and Peter cut a trench a couple hundred feet up to the house to bury the AC cable and a separate cable for the on-off switch for the converter. Drainage channels were dug to secure the foundations of the windmill. Finally an electric power point appeared on the wall in the living room. This gave me an absurd sense of achievement. Now all we needed was wind. There was really not enough and we were always checking the battery levels with a hydrometer and having to carry them up and down from their dungeon home on a ladder. Sometimes we would wait for days for enough energy to store up for me to spend a few hours editing, then Maretta Greer, who had recently arrived from India, would blow it all by thoughtlessly playing Dylan records so we had to wait even longer.
The little dakini playing her bells
& listening to late baritone Dylan
dancing in the living room’s forgot almost
th’ electric supply’s vanishing
from the batteries in the pasture |
[AG: ‘Ecologue’] |
There were four bedrooms off the small upstairs hallway. Sue and I were given a room at the front that had a connecting door through to Allen’s big room at the rear. Gordon had the other front room, over the living room, and the remaining back room was occupied by Julius. A ladder continued up to the attic where Ray Bremser and his family lived. Gregory Corso and his girlfriend Belle Gardener previously occupied this and it still contained a moth-eaten lion skin originally bagged in Africa by Belle’s father. It lay mouldering in the dusty attic, spreadeagled on the floor, a terrible snarl on its face, its fangs yellowing, glass eyes smeared from three-year-old Georgia’s tiny fingers. The eaves sloped down to the floor and the inaccessible space was filled with piles of old New Yorker magazines that Ray was methodically reading his way through. There was plenty of room. At the end, a large window, covered in fly spots, looked out at the rickety barn, which was painted in traditional reddish-brown and white panels.
Peter and Denise’s room was accessible only from the porch, which gave them privacy. Peter’s relationship with Allen was a complicated one. They had been lovers since they first met in San Francisco in 1954 and had spent time living in Tangier, Paris and India as well as years in New York. Despite Allen’s frequent pronouncements about their gay marriage, Peter’s sexual orientation was heterosexual, and even when having sex with Allen he fantasised that he was a woman. He came from a very dysfunctional family and several of his siblings were in a mental hospital. He was enormously generous and good willed, but the pressures on him from family and friends sometimes made him resort to drugs or alcohol in prodigious amounts.
When Sue and I first arrived at the farm at the end of May, Peter was on speed. It made him terribly paranoid. He thought that the rednecks were going to come up from Oneonta and kill us all. He became convinced that his portable Sony television was watching him and attacked it with an iron bar. He smashed its car batteries too, for good measure. Denise was understandably annoyed about the TV and so he had to buy another one, but three days later he smashed that up as well, throwing the tangle of electronics and coloured wires out into the front yard where Allen then stood, bending forward, tugging at his beard, contemplating it with horror. Peter began pondering Allen’s rather unorthodox views on sex and decided that there was a grave danger that he might attempt to fuck Lash the horse. Accordingly Peter took to sleeping in the barn in order to protect her from Allen’s amorous advances.
His withdrawal from speed was anguished and very painful to watch. His voice sounded like gravel – his ‘leper’s voice’, as he called it (in 1961, he and Allen had lived in Benares, near Dasadsumad Ghat, where the lepers gathered, and he had got to know some of them). Peter had a boisterous speedy humour when he was up, which counterbalanced the torment as he tried to kick it. One evening we all sat around the dinner table eating while Peter lay outside on the path, banging his head on the stone flags, crying and issuing terrible groans, cursing himself: ‘Why do I do it? It’s poison, it’s fucking poison!’
Allen hovered around him, wringing his hands, helpless, offering advice, suggesting that they chant together the Hindu prayers they learned in India to ease the pain. Peter angrily retorted: ‘That stuff doesn’t work! You don’t really believe in all that chanting, do you?’
Allen, sorrowful, sat with him, worrying, wiping away the sweat as Peter burned up and writhed on the damp evening grass. Eventually Allen came in to eat.
‘Go get your camera and film Peter,’ he told Gordon.
‘No, I couldn’t,’ said Gordon. ‘Peter’s a friend.’
‘He’ll thank you for it later, if he gets over it. And maybe it’ll show someone else what speed’ll do to you! You should film it. It’s real. It’s much more real than all those sunsets and trees you film...’ Allen was quite insistent.
Gordon slowly shook his head and crouched low over the table, not looking up. Allen raised his voice, almost shouting. ‘That’s what being a film-maker is about. Showing things as they are. Well, that’s Peter out there groaning. That’s how he is!’
Allen was suffering almost as much as Peter.
‘Yeah. Go-wan. Why not?’ demanded Denise. She sounded desperate. She had done everything possible. Their biggest worry was that Peter had still more amphetamine hidden round the farm and that he would have to go through his withdrawal all over again. He had sold letters from Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen and spent all $12,000 on speed in a matter of months, making false entries in his bank-book so that Allen would not know. Trips to Manhattan were a constant danger because he had friends who would give him more. Allen was determined that he kick it; it was one of the reasons he bought the farm. He saw it as a refuge from the city, somewhere that Peter could kick speed, Gregory Corso could kick junk and, in his fantasies, that Jack Kerouac could come and dry out. The Committee On Poetry, Allen’s charitable foundation which owned the farm, was dedicated to helping poets, particularly the vulnerable survivors of the Beat Generation.
Peter gradually calmed down; his voice eventually returned to normal. He stopped ordering his brother Julius about so much; he became less distant and more warm and friendly. It had been a terrible period and Julius had taken the brunt of it. Catatonic Julius simply did whatever Peter told him to do, without speaking or dissenting. Peter made him carry heavy rocks all day, or spend hours digging the soybean patch in the hot summer sun. Sometimes they forgot him and would have to return to the fields in the evening to find him, still standing where they last left him, head lowered, large stomach protruding over his pants, hair sticking up in clumps.
Once off speed, Peter began to work compulsively. In his manic phase he had already planted out asparagus beds, strawberry beds and peas. Now he decided that soybeans were good for you. He would plant more, maybe an acre. He and Gordon fenced off land with posts and wire and planted frantically. He built a larger chicken run to give the hens more space to run around but we never were able to hatch out any eggs because Julius would always disturb the sitting hens in the mornings before we got up, searching for eggs to scramble. During the day the hens flapped happily in dust baths near the house wall. Peter began to fence the land, all 99 acres of it. Each day he would disappear with Julius and not return until the evening meal, still filled with energy, his body muscular and burned brown in the sun. Allen was relieved. The farm had worked. It had broken Peter’s addiction. Every dollar spent was worth it.
Julius clearly benefited from life in the open air but it did little to improve his mental state. Every night he had to be told to go to bed or else he would sit on the settee all night, staring straight ahead. Once upstairs he had to be told to take his boots off, or else he would sleep in them, but he knew how to undress. In the morning he would wait in the upstairs hallway until someone told him to have breakfast: ‘Go and have breakfast, Julie,’ and down he would go and make himself some eggs. Sometimes three different people would tell him to eat breakfast and he would eat three breakfasts. He liked to hang around outside my room in the mornings because he knew where I kept my cigarettes and that I’d give him one if he gave me his imploring look.
One time Peter told him to lay a crazy paving round the side of the house to the barn to stop mud being walked into the kitchen. He gave him a big pile of flat stones and showed him how to do it. Julius put on his big yellow work gloves and set to work. Hours later we were amazed to see the pathway. It started out as it should be, with the stones carefully arranged to fit together, but it became narrower and narrower until, as it turned the corner of the house, it was just a line of tiny pebbles, not even an inch across. Allen summoned everyone to come and look. Julie seemed quite pleased with his work and stood next to it, smiling contentedly. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards an empty hay truck drove out of the barn and ran over it, cracking and burying all the stones.
Julie rarely spoke, once saying nothing for a whole year. His rare pronouncements were therefore of great interest. One time, out of the blue, he told Gordon Ball that he felt as if he were encased in a suit of copper, and when asked by Gregory Corso, ‘What is the best way to live?’ Julie told him, ‘Repose.’ Another time, when he became suddenly voluble, he was asked why he hadn’t spoken in so long. ‘I didn’t have nuthin’ to say,’ he said.
We didn’t see much of Ray Bremser. He knew that if he left the attic he might be asked to help out. Ray was an old-time Beatnik poet. He read Howl shortly after it was published when he was in the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey, doing six years on two counts of armed robbery. Somehow he got Allen’s address and wrote to him at the Beat Hotel in Paris, sending him his poems. Allen put him in touch with LeRoi Jones, who published them in Yugen, one of the best Beat Generation magazines of the time.
When Ray got out in November 1958 he was feted by Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac, who recognised genuine raw talent when they saw it and appreciated the jazz rhythms in his work. Many years later, Bob Dylan was attracted to his work, but Ray always remained a minor character in the Beat pantheon. Ray was skinny with a hooked nose and a miserable downturned mouth. He reminded me of Magwitch, the criminal in Dickens’ Great Expectations. He looked tough but he was soft and hypersensitive, often tearful. Prison and drugs had broken him. He was born in Jersey City and had a strong Jersey accent. He liked to recite the words on the huge sign outside the condom factory where his mother Gertrude had worked: ‘What Jersey City Makes, the World Uses’. His mother used to bring home pockets full of prophylactics, which she put to good use about the house. They were ideal, for instance, for covering the tops of glass milk bottles once they were opened.
Ray was a hopeless case, always in trouble, often in jail. He found life easier, cheaper and safer in Mexico and Central America, where he could lay around all day and send his adoring wife, Bonnie, out to prostitute herself in order to pay for his heroin habit. She wrote about it in her harrowing memoir Trioa. Ray’s behaviour towards Bonnie did not endear him to most of the people living on the farm who thought his patriarchal attitude was despicable. Ray had written to Allen on 29 October 1969, from the St Lucie county jail in Fort Pierce, Florida, to say that Bonnie had left him, his mother had died and that the State Department had flown him to Miami when he applied for repatriation from Guatemala. ‘I’m destitute & in shit of trouble,’ he told Allen. ‘You are my only friend; so forgive me for imposing again – I need some money to pay fines for drunk/disorderly & breaking the peace. $150 would cover it.’ He explained that he had had an accident in Guatemala, leaving him with a broken shoulder, four broken ribs, a broken elbow and little finger, and sprains. He didn’t think he was in good enough condition to hitchhike up through Georgia and the Carolinas. ‘Please help me return to New York’ he begged. Naturally Allen sent the money. Ray reunited his family – if they were ever split up – and Ray, Bonnie and little Georgia arrived on the farm in mid-December 1969.