by Mick Farren
Although the Roundhouse party provided one model for how UFO should be organised, a few others were already available. In San Francisco, the organisation known as the Family Dog, headed by Chet Helms, was already staging psychedelic events at the Avalon Ballroom, and promoter Bill Graham was in the process of putting on similar shows at the Fillmore Auditorium. Both were basically more commercial and accessible versions of the ‘Acid Tests’ run by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Kesey’s Prankster parties had been little more than a series of planned assaults on all the social conventions of the time, funded in the main by the proceeds from his bestseller One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Travelling in their psychedelic bus, and deploying sound, lights and considerable quantities of acid-spiked Koolaid, the Pranksters had gone about the business of spreading the doctrine of anarchic hedonism and mind expansion via the use of LSD; in course of their campaigning, they had united such diverse groups as the Hell’s Angels, the Grateful Dead and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The Pranksters also created the first market for the legendary acid manufactured by renegade genius chemist Owsley Stanley III, whose underground lab, at its 1967 peak of production, was turning out trips in batches of one and a half million a time.
Kesey himself had first encountered acid in 1959 while acting as a paid volunteer in an experimental LSD-25 programme at the Veterans’ Hospital in Menlo Park in the Bay Area. Kesey and some hundred or so others, mainly students and bohemians, were paid a hundred dollars a dose to drop the acid and then allow researchers to study their reactions. (Allen Ginsberg also took his first trip as part of a similar programme, commenting that it was like ‘being hooked into Big Brother’. What neither Kesey nor Ginsberg knew at the time was that the secret sponsor of both sets of experiments was the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKULTRA experimental mind-control division. It might thus be possible to claim that the CIA inadvertently initiated the ‘Summer of Love’. Or perhaps not so inadvertently. The rumour has regularly been repeated by Bill Burroughs and others that the CIA actually promoted the spread of acid as a recreational street drug, in order to see what might happen. If this were the case, the experiment went disastrously wrong. The agency’s alleged hope was that it would yield a docile and malleable civilian population; instead they got a plague of uncontrollable hippies.
What went down at the Avalon, the Fillmore and UFO was considerably more tame than any of the Acid Tests. It was a formulaic combination of rock bands and lightshows that could be presented week after week without the absolute need to get out of town on the magic bus after each show, but it didn’t preclude a whole lot of extraneous weirdness. From Manfred selling his acid to the bizarre creativity of David Medalla’s dance troupe, the Exploding Galaxy, the night trip shape-warping and weird scenes in a lot of gold mines were far from eliminated. All things were possible just as long as the organisers weren’t legally liable.
What took everyone by surprise was just how fast the manifestation mushroomed. Within a matter of weeks the crowds at UFO grew from seventy or eighty to several hundred, and the patrons ranged from Eton and Oxford, King’s Road groovers to ex-mods who’d been fired from the Ford plant at Dagenham for being stoned on the line. Although hardly the kind of club that needed celebrity attendance for validation, the rock & roll elite began to show up, placing more stress on the door staff by their unwillingness to stand in line and their stellar need for preferential treatment. Pete Townshend was probably the celebrity regular, showing up most weeks when he wasn’t recording or on tour, and usually donating a cheque for a hundred pounds or so for the ‘cause’. Keith Moon was in once, but left, deterred by the lack of alcohol. Eric Burdon made sure he was fucked-up before he arrived. Paul McCartney came down a few times, again exhibiting a nervousness about an outbreak of Beatlemania that never materialised. Jimi Hendrix always came very late, and sat in at least once on bass with Steve Howe from the band Tomorrow. And real flurry of interest occurred when, of all people, Christine Keeler appeared, in the company of some heavyweight pot dealers. She looked older and more worn than she had when the Profumo scandal was bringing down the Tory party, and also seemed to have had some kind of breast augmentation. Of all the celebs who ever hit UFO, she was the one who drew the most attention.
The sudden growth of UFO brought about my direct involvement. Entry to the club was being facilitated by a couple of inexperienced women, who found themselves completely swamped by the numbers and all the attendant hippie bullshit. I had no intention of taking over the door, but just stepped into the breach to break a potentially disastrous human traffic jam that had backed up the stairs and had the cops sending messages to ‘get this scum off our pavement or we bust everybody’.
Enter the Hassle Guy like Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel. ‘Don’t worry, ma’am, I’ve got it covered. I’ll sort out the mess.’
In the few months since the Roundhouse party, I’d discovered that no one exactly applied for a job with the underground. If you recognised that something wasn’t being done, you did it, and if you didn’t immediately screw things up, everyone left you alone and within a matter of days you’d become a fixture. It was by this random osmosis that, in the spring of 1967, I not only found myself running the door at UFO, but part of the emergency crew putting out IT in the wake of its first bust.
Ticket to the Underground
In 1914, just before the curtain rose on the trench slaughter of World War I, Aleister Crowley and his mistress Leila Waddell hosted an event in London called the Rites of Eleusis. Over some four or five nights they presented a quasi-masonic ritual, music, poetry, dance and drama. Actors pronounced that God was dead with a ponderous Nietzschean finality, readings were given from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and, on the final night, the audience received, communion-style, the ‘Elixir of the Gods’ – in fact, red wine generously spiked with mescaline. As the punters tripped out, a chorus announced the dawning of the New Aeon based on Rabelais’ Law of Thelema: ‘Do what thou wilt’. Sound familiar?
Whatever Crowley’s intentions may have been, the Rites of Eleusis didn’t hurl the city into open revolt, and Jupiter didn’t collide with Mars. Just like the UFO Club, or the dawn of the punks at the Roxy ten years later, it didn’t, on its own, cause the downfall of the power structure, or the collapse of Western civilisation. Maybe all these things were just over-hyped parties, or pieces of free-form performance art, which in itself is perfectly acceptable, unless one has pinned too many hopes on the power of the moment. I’m sure Crowley walked a fairly tortuous path before he staged the Rites of Eleusis; I know I did, before the aforementioned osmosis brought me to acting as gauleiter at the door of UFO.
The effective epicentre of osmosis proved to be Indica Books on Southampton Row, on the edge of time-honoured, politely nonconformist Bloomsbury. It sounds strange today, when small sub-genres in both music and literature have their own specialist shops, but stumbling into Indica was like a ticket to the magic kingdom. In those days everything except the run-of-the-mill had to be sought out and searched for. Better Books, on Charing Cross Road, could provide a reasonable selection of beat and contemporary poetry and novels. Dobell’s Record Store, almost diagonally across the street, had jazz, blues and folk covered, Musicland on Berwick Street had the psychedelic imports, but that was about it. Even though John Peel was regularly playing Captain Beefheart on the radio, import copies of Safe As Milk were hard to find outside the West End of London. Most other things had to be hunted down with patience and diligence. Comic books, surf, hotrod, UFO and true-crime magazines could only be culled from the international newsagents in Old Compton Street. Even dirty bookshops did their part in that. A copy of William Burroughs’ Junkie might be ferreted out from a pile of remaindered paperback American porn titles like Slaves of Sin, Girl Love and I Was Backseat Dynamite. Copies of the girly mag Cavalier, which carried writing by Paul Krassner and Harlan Ellison, could now and again be found, or an Olympia Press edition of Tropic of Cancer or The Story of O.
Co
ming out of this kind of depredation, it seemed that Indica Books had it all. City Lights poetry, a whole shelf of Burroughs, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Malcolm X, Tantric Yoga, Terry Southern, Timothy Leary, Mervyn Peake, the Marquis de Sade, J.G. Ballard and H.P. Lovecraft. Although Indica didn’t profess to be a record store, the rack of LPs by the cash register held almost unobtainable treasures like Sun Ra, the Fugs, Eric Dolphy and the Holy Modal Rounders, as well as spoken-word performances by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Ezra Pound, Melvin Van Peebles and Lord Buckley. The magazine rack was another revelation. I discovered that, in the USA, underground newspapers were springing up like mushrooms in the dawn. Copies of the San Francisco Oracle, Village Voice and East Village Other out of New York, the Fifth Estate from Detroit and the LA Free Press, featuring Harlan Ellison’s TV reviews, were displayed as one great newsprint temptation. My primary reason for going there was to pick up the latest issue of IT, but once inside the shop I lapsed into a kind of daze. From this wealth of communication and creativity it was almost possible to imagine that freaks had an entire media all of their own scattered about the planet.
Presiding over this wonderland was Miles, a bookishly pale and amiably academic, bespectacled Brian Jones, who handled books as though they were living entities, and who would have felt at home in a thirteenth-century monastic scriptorium, except for his profound love of women, and their reciprocal love of him. Miles was a compassionate and dignified man, simultaneously neat and fashionable, erudite and alarmingly well informed. He might have made a flamboyant Oxford don except that, like me, he was largely self-educated – in other words, he went to art school. In his case, Gloucestershire College of Art in Cheltenham, but otherwise our early back stories ran in parallel. Miles had also benefited from an art-school exposure to the twin inspirations of Marxism and bohemianism, and from these ingredients, plus jazz, poetry and rock ’n’ roll, he had started building his own philosophical cocktail. He’d embraced CND more fully than I ever had. He’d taken part in the Aldermaston marches, while all I’d done was wear the badge.
In addition to the wonder of Indica itself, IT was being published in the basement, and, while I browsed the shelves wishing that I was independently wealthy and could buy all this stuff, odd figures would emerge from the bowels via a flight of steps to one side of the store, and I was irrationally reminded of Norman Bates keeping his mother in the root cellar. At first I simply went into the shop, looked around at some length, bought what I could afford and left. It wasn’t because I was standoffish, or wanted to keep myself to myself, and it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t like the look of the people. A true confession that you may find hard to believe is that I am very shy. In order to deal with strangers, audiences and the public at large, I simply shut my subjective eyes and become someone else.
Therapists talk about the ‘inner child’, but I think what I’ve always employed is the ‘outer son-of-a-bitch’. I’ve noticed in many of the accounts of these times, both contemporary and retrospective, that I’m referred to as ‘fast-talking’, ‘a psychedelic gangster’, ‘a verbal wrecking ball’, or words to that effect. I guess few realised that the energetic glibness and steamrollering persuasion I could bring into play when required had evolved as a façade – what cockneys call a ‘front’ – to protect my insecurities, inadequacies and pathological fears of rejection. Not that I had to use much front on Miles. The awkward part, as with Hoppy at the Roundhouse, was knowing how to sustain the conversation beyond the first pleasantries. ‘Hey, great place you’ve got here.’
‘Thanks.’
At that point it’s hard, particularly for two Englishmen, to raise the exchange to the level of actual conversation. Fortunately, if memory serves, Miles was charitable enough to make the move for me, enquiring about my tastes and interests, and obliquely wanting to know what had brought me into his store in the first place. This was typical of Miles’ gentlemanly manipulation of a situation. Nothing draws out a stranger more than letting him talk about his own enthusiasms. We discovered our parallel courses, except that Miles was far better connected. After all, he owned the damned bookshop, and I was merely a punter. But, with the ice broken, an increasingly lengthy conversation ensued, until Miles would take a break whenever I showed and we’d repair to the Kardomah Coffee House just up the street to shoot the radical shit in greater comfort.
I discovered that he had used his time after getting out of art school a good deal more profitably that I had. In addition to working on various embryonic underground press projects with Hoppy, he had cemented an alliance with Peter Asher, of the singing duo Peter and Gordon, whose sister Jane was Paul McCartney’s current girlfriend, and with John Dunbar, who was then still married to Marianne Faithfull. Together they had formed Miles, Asher and Dunbar – giving themselves the acronym MAD – the holding company for Indica Books and the Indica Gallery. Both the bookstore and gallery had originally occupied the same building in Mason’s Yard, off Duke Street, St James, right next door to the ultra-trendy Scotch of St James nightspot. Later, Miles had moved the bookstore to Southampton Row, when Mason’s Yard had become too crowded and chaotic.
As proprietor of the hottest hip bookstore in town, and through the contacts already established by Asher and Dunbar, Miles quickly numbered the more literate Beatles and Rolling Stones among his clients, and moved in some high hip circles, in which the first acid was making the rounds and to embrace the avant-garde was a chic necessity. He’d maintained a full and lively correspondence with both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs that went back to his college days, and served as a crucial link between the rock elite and the intelligentsia of Swinging London – what today might be called a facilitator of cultural interface. Even though he seemed to have a knack for opening pipelines to the rich and famous, Miles was ever the egalitarian – otherwise, what the hell was he doing taking coffee breaks with the likes of me?
Miles had given much consideration to the concepts of an alternative society, and where I was wholly obsessed with the infliction of creative damage, he was already thinking in terms of an entrepreneurial materialism, in which freaks would establish their own means of underground distribution, initially in the fields of music, art and literature, that could outmanoeuvre and outperform the less adaptable systems of overground capitalism. Despite his socialist roots, Miles was very aware that capitalism might be needed to fight capitalism. The political acceptability of making money within the revolution would be a continuous bone of contention throughout the entire period covered by this book. In the Sixties the counterculture often came close to blows on the subject of ‘hip capitalism’, while a decade later, when the Clash signed with CBS, it was condemned as a betrayal. Miles had been to an early Sixties youth conference in Cuba and had seen the frustration of a revolution under embargo and strapped for cash.
One reason that I never fought with Miles on the sensitive question of economic pragmatism was base self-interest. The systems he wanted to create were exactly the ones needed to make my own chosen endeavours a reality. To get my rocks off, I needed clubs to play in, magazines to write for and, later, the facilities to make and distribute records. I also admired Miles’ work ethic. Something was always cooking. If it wasn’t the bookstore it was IT, if it wasn’t IT it was UFO, and what separated him from the dog-pack of psychedelic hustlers was that he seemed to be in for the long haul and not just the quick score. In the underground, a work ethic was what separated the sheep from the goats. Too many middle-class acid-head dropouts, instead of marching forward resolutely into the utopian dawn, became lethargic, lazy and larcenous and, when challenged, able to come up with more excuses than a pimp going to jail.
It may have been my own work ethic that caused Miles to decide I should involve myself in IT and suggest that I should come down into the Indica basement and meet Tom McGrath, the newspaper’s then editor. McGrath was an anti-establishment old-timer who had previously edited the CND paper Peace News. He seemed worn, and I’d discover later th
at he had a not inconsiderable heroin habit. I’m sure the very last thing he needed on that autumn afternoon was a youthful maniac all fired up to explain the shortcomings of his paper. The more nervous I felt, the more impassioned I became. In a nutshell, IT should stop printing the interminable letters of Ezra bloody Pound, and the dumb cartoons of Jeff Nuttall, and throw all its weight behind the rock & roll youth revolt. McGrath politely heard me out and then played a Zen trick I would pocket for future use. ‘Okay, kid, if you don’t think this stuff’s being covered, why don’t you go out and cover it yourself.’ In the space of an hour or so I found that I’d become IT’s ad hoc rock & roll revolution editor. As I walked away, I was a dog with two tails, wagging both of them. Not only had I penetrated the heart of the underground, but I’d been hired to fulfil a specific function. What I didn’t know was that when a paper rarely paid its contributors or even the nominal staff, assignments and appointments were all too easy to hand out.
My first move was to write a lengthy polemic that started, ‘Let’s face it, we’re living in something of a police state . . .’ It went on to make the point that any revolution that included marijuana as one of its articles of faith was vulnerable. The authorities didn’t have to mount McCarthy-style witchhunts. We could simply be arrested under the all-pervasive drug laws. Far from advocating that the would-be revolutionary should stop smoking dope, though, I counselled quasi-criminal cunning and recognition of the danger. The piece was forceful, if gauche, and people seemed to feel that I could actually write. For my part, I was overjoyed to have been published the first time out.
