by Mick Farren
When offered a share in a pad that was already the stuff of local hippie legend, Joy and I naturally jumped at the chance. Not only because it was an obvious improvement on our current living conditions, but because the disorganised kibbutz in the East End was clearly moving into the final phase of entropy. Ralph had gone and Pete was becoming more and more uncomfortable both with his role in the band and his protracted stay in London when, in theory, he was supposed to be on his way round the world. The options were either to reorganise or to bale out and we accepted the paisley parachute, totally ignoring the fact that the situation between Joy and me was far from solidly bonded. The marriage had grown progressively more shaky with both of us straying sexually, but leaving the all-but-unconcealed infidelities unchallenged and unmentioned.
Although they were both too polite to say so, I’m sure Chris and Sandy often rued the day they’d taken us in. Joy had a fixation for adopting stray cats, both feline and human. The former culminated in the cat population growing to an uncontrolled complement of six, and the latter in a Canadian called Jamie Mandelkau, who had more gall than most living males and would ultimately steal my wife and wreck my band, while he constantly declared himself my best buddy and I wondered if I should go loudly and flamboyantly insane.
Boo Radley’s Porch
The consensual opinion of a number of my friends was that all my troubles really stemmed from my not dropping acid. I tended to agree with them, but still I didn’t take the acid. The reasons were multiple. I was nervous. I didn’t doubt that LSD-25 was the ultimate mindwrencher and had trepidations as to how much wrenching my mind would stand. I also rebelled against the mystic trappings with which the ingesting of psychedelic drugs had been invested by the Tim Leary propaganda machine. Many of my peers treated LSD as a spiritual rite of passage with distinctly macho overtones, and even though they sequestered themselves in their room with their pure water, brown rice and copy of Blonde on Blonde, a definite vibe could be felt that you weren’t a real man until you’d taken your righteous trip.
Taking acid had strong connotations of the kids in To Kill a Mockingbird scaring themselves stupid by sneaking onto Boo Radley’s porch. It all rather reminded me of how, at about twelve or thirteen, a big deal had been created around bluffing your way into your first X-certificate horror film. In my case it had been Blood of the Vampire, starring veteran Shakespearian actor Sir Donald Woolfit – probably fallen on hard times despite a knighthood – and Hammer scream-queen Barbara Shelley. The film was totally unremarkable, not even a true vampire movie in that Woolfit, the director of a lunatic asylum, was in fact a regular mortal who just needed blood transfusions to go on living in the days before blood-banks. It proved far from the expected test of nerve. The true ordeal, as in most things, was the anticipation. How bad would it be? Although I laughed and joked with my friends, and pretended that the hardest part would be gaining admission despite being under-age, in private I wondered if I’d be able to handle it.
And so it was with lysergic acid diethylamide 25. Ken Kesey calling his mobile freakshow and drug party the ‘Acid Test’ was no empty pun. The belief in the mid-Sixties was that acid would not only bring enlightenment and a profound change in human attitudes, but would separate the sheep from the metaphysical goats. It wasn’t exactly that any philosophical argument one might make was invalidated by not having dropped acid, but it was certainly diminished by the fact that one hadn’t passed the test and was thus still not the recipient of the chemical revelation.
Fortunately, even as an acid virgin, I was too forceful to be ignored, but I was very aware that a number of friends, associates and cronies, who knew that my dropping acid was totally inevitable, simply wished I’d get it over with so that they’d see what kind of Farren came out the other side. Maybe he’d stop being such a bloody pessimist and constantly bleating on about the sorry state of the revolution. I believe a couple of attempts were made to spike me, but I unwittingly outwitted these, and when the moment finally came I would confound the Learyists by dropping my first trip in one of the most public and self-destructive ways possible. To my relief, I didn’t emerge as the kind of blissed-out clod who, when railing against the dangerous shape of things to come, simply smiled and assured myself that ‘It’ll be groovy’. I would still be in sufficiently belligerent shape to snap back, ‘Of course it won’t be fucking groovy. The world is a mind-bogglingly complex place and no one is going to walk away who refuses to acknowledge that.’
One of the great psychedelic dilemmas centred on leadership and a coherent philosophy. In that they had neither, the hippies found both their strength and their weakness. The easy out for any liberation movement is to band together behind the first charismatic, half-decent orator who comes along, embrace said orator’s narrow ideology and then march boldly into the future to found some Reich or Comintern intended to last a thousand years. This was the course taken by both the radical Right and the revolutionary Left, and had given us Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin and, currently, Chairman Mao and the Red Guard. Early on Bob Dylan had been offered the crown, but he’d deftly side-stepped with the instruction to ‘watch the parking meters’. Tim Leary was side-lining himself by insisting on the sacrament of LSD before anyone so much as blew their nose. Mick Jagger avoided the gig by the combination of vapidity and small-time Satanism that was ultimately unmasked at Altamont, and Jimi Hendrix talked exclusively through the guitar. Rumours from Havana had it that Che had split with Fidel over very similar questions.
The twin problems were agenda and direction. The Dialectics of Liberation had attempted to formulate both and had blown itself up in total dissent by the time the Deviants howled it to a close. To all appearances, the counterculture could only move by collective consent of a kind that had only previously been observed in lemmings. Obviously it would have been so much tidier if a few directives could have been issued from some central committee. Fighting inertia with agitprop could be exhausting and time-consuming. Fortunately, though, at around that time London was treated to a prime example of what happened to movements with leaders, hierarchy and an iron-bound ideology that also espoused LSD as a means of control. It came dressed up like a hybrid of Count Dracula and Prince Valiant, and made a nuisance of itself for a year or so around the London psychedelic scene.
The Process Church of the Final Judgement was first established in London’s upmarket Mayfair area in 1967. Its members, with their long Christ-like, centre-parted hair and uniform of black and purple capes, quickly became a familiar sight at psychedelic clubs and hippie gatherings. They seemed very keen on recruiting bikers and hippies to their movement, particularly wealthy hippies and – best of all – wealthy hippie rock stars. In this they were less than successful. According to legend, they had a stoned Marianne Faithfull in their clutches for a few days, but she was ultimately rescued by some burly Rolling Stones roadies and bodyguards. The Stones might have been in the throes of generating their own Satanic majesty, but they certainly didn’t want some other group of power-fascinated freaks muscling in on their act, and they especially didn’t want them carrying off their women. The Process philosophy that good and evil – symbolised by Jesus and Lucifer – were simply the two sides of the same yin/yang coin had its appeal and conjured loud echoes of Aleister Crowley’s ‘Do what you will is the only law’. Their logo, however, was a little too like a Nazi swastika redrawn by a slick Swiss typographer.
I was tempted to go and take a look at one of the open-house meetings they held at their palatial joint in Mayfair, but I kept putting it off. It wasn’t that the Process frightened me, but I knew a visit would culminate in conflict and I asked myself if I really needed the aggravation. What would I really learn from the experience? Also I was warned off by a number of my friends. Chris Rowley dismissed the Process out of hand as ‘Nazi psychiatry’ and assured me that, although a good slanging match might be fun, it was also a total waste of my time. Steve Abrams, the amiable expatriate American academic who was one of the drivi
ng forces behind the marijuana legalisation movement and had conceived the full-page advert in The Times, also thought the group had definite Nazi leanings. Steve had actually given a lecture there. He would smile as though relishing the joke. ‘It was on brainwashing. It seemed appropriate.’ In the end, I never bothered to go.
It was only with the publication of Ed Sanders’ 1971 gonzo account of Charlie Manson and his followers, The Family, that we really learned what the Process was all about, and even that was rendered sketchy by the removal of a crucial chapter of the book, after threats of a massive lawsuit by the Church of Scientology. Robert DeGrimston, a breakaway Scientologist, had founded the Process in 1963 as a money-spinning mind-control entity, but experienced some kind of dark epiphany in Xtul in the Yucatan and, after that, things swerved well out of hand – some claimed to the point where the Process and the Manson family committed a number of joint ritual murders, possibly in the name of Abraxas, the rooster-headed Gnostic god in whom darkness and light are both united and transcended. DeGrimston’s wife Kathy didn’t help matters by claiming to be a reincarnation of Joseph Goebbels and Hecate. By 1974 the Process had dropped off the radar.
Or so we thought.
In 1996 a Process website appeared on the internet, and the issue of the rock magazine Alternative Press for February 1997 ran a feature detailing both the history and return of the Process – without the DeGrimstons – and how the newly revived cult was having an influence on a number of ‘alternative’ rockers. The website and the Alternative Press article were both a little vague regarding the aims and beliefs of this resuscitated, but seemingly somewhat sanitised, Process, but both appeared to verify that the Sixties – both good and bad – are always with us.
Okay, so Dylan was right, you couldn’t follow leaders, and the Process – and, a little later, Charlie Manson – offered us all the confirmation we needed. The hippie revolution would clearly remain rudderless, and I had to decide what I was going to do while it drifted to its eventual safe haven or destructive reef. Join Jim Morrison in preaching chaos, disorder and irresponsible drunkenness? It sounded pretty damned appealing, except that I had an underground newspaper to look after.
Or so I thought.
Sacked from the Revolution
We were eating oysters and drinking Guinness somewhere in Mayfair, and Nigel was augmenting his with double shots of Jameson. He clearly had something on his mind that was making him nervous. Although only in his early twenties, Nigel Samuel was already so far gone as an alcoholic that it was rare to see him eat, and even then it was usually something semi-liquid, like soup or the aforementioned oysters. It would be six or seven years before I’d learn what it was like to be in that condition.
After an awkward preamble, he came to the point. ‘You know, Mick, the underground doesn’t owe you a living.’
I gestured to the waiter. Now I wanted a large Jameson. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Nigel looked even more uncomfortable and chased a swallow of whiskey with Guinness and yet another oyster. ‘It’s been decided that we’re going to have to let you go.’
‘Are you telling me I’m being fired from IT?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No one’s ever been fired from IT.’
‘Then it’ll be a first.’
‘So where’s Bill Levy, shouldn’t he be doing this?’
Nigel looked round helplessly. He’d obviously been handed the shitty end of the stick, and was being expected to hand it on to me. In that, I suppose we had a certain kinship. ‘I think we’d both better have another drink.’
Nigel was plainly very unhappy, but I wasn’t quite ready to let him off the hook. ‘This is fucking unreal.’
I mean, here I was sitting in some expensive oyster bar, being told by a scared and drunk boy millionaire that I was being sacked from the revolution, and the only reason such a strange occurrence was coming to pass was because, over the last couple of months, he had bought up a large part of the existing underground.
The arrival of Nigel had taken me completely by surprise. Seemingly he’d simply walked into Indica one day, a tall, near-emaciated apparition with limp hair falling in his face and wearing a floor-length velvet coat in Robin Hood green, and enquired if he could be of any help. When it was discovered that this strange newcomer had a car, he was immediately dispatched to deliver bundles of newspapers to the newsstands we supplied directly; but when someone went out to help him unload a pile of returns, and the car turned out to be a Ferrari, a whole new interest was taken in the willing newcomer.
I think I must have been off with the Deviants at the time because all I remember is returning to find that the entire set-up at IT had changed. The business office still lurked below Indica. Joy was still a part of it, but Max Zwemmer had handed the running of the paper over to a guy supposedly called Dave Hall (although, to this day, I don’t know if Dave Hall was his real name). Even more than Max, Dave was exactly what an underground newspaper needed as a business manager. I never asked any questions, so he never had to confirm or deny that the paper’s turnover was being used to launder cash for the hashish trade and, at times, even finance the odd deal. It may sound odd that the entire business side of the paper should be handed over to a complete stranger with fairly obvious criminal contacts. It probably sounds even odder that I was ready to accept Dave because Joy vouched for him and was prepared to go with her judgement. Our marriage might be ready for the wrecking ball, but I still trusted her never to allow the newspaper to fall into the hands of a conman. Dave Hall was yet another of those taken-on-trust alliances that, by some serial miracle, succeeded more times than they failed.
I had no problem with the arrival of Dave in the Indica basement. What worried me far more was that the entire editorial staff, of which I was supposedly a part, had vanished. ‘Where did everyone go?’
‘Bill and his crew are working over at Nigel’s.’
Both parts of this sentence failed to compute. I hadn’t been aware that Bill Levy had a crew. I knew that the skeleton staff with which I’d been working was a thing of the past, but I wasn’t aware that so much hiring had taken place that there was now an editorial ‘crew’. It also struck me as kind of weird that suddenly business and editorial were in different locations. Okay, so the Indica basement was cramped, but I’d always figured that working cheek by jowl generated a valuable solidarity. Also, during the emergency, business worked by day, while art and editorial tended to work by night. I didn’t get what was now going on, but rather than stand around speculating, I took a cab over to where Nigel maintained a luxury flat just off Sloane Square.
The first thing I discovered was that I really wasn’t wanted by the new editorial team, except in so far as I might have a handle on the rock ’n’ roll end of things. Not that Bill and his ‘crew’ – who were all new faces to me – were much interested in rock ’n’ roll except for the fact that the record industry had finally started buying advertising in the underground press. We were back with the hated concept of a ‘music section’. As for the direction of the remainder of the paper, Bill seemed to have a course plotted that suited his personality as thumbnailed by Dave Robins in Days in the Life: ‘A middle-aged American, mid-thirties then a former college lecturer and Ezra Pound fanatic’. My hackles rose. More Ezra bloody Pound? This was assuredly not the publication I’d busted my hump to preserve, and conflict appeared inevitable. I suspected Bill and the others were probably dreading my return and the predictably self-righteous merry hell I was going to raise. As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. It had been a long haul, and my reaction, much to their relief, was to wander off in disgust.
I don’t think I visited the new editorial office more than twice more. Instead I sunk myself in a non-communicative sulk, took care of my business out of the Indica basement, turned in a few record reviews and had as little to do with Bill and his merry men as possible. My brief glimpses of their operating methods indicated that they seemed to
have an exceptionally good thing going. They lounged around in this elegant, James Bond pad, while Nigel hung out and ordered booze, Chinese food or other goodies and they giggled at the kind of inside jokes I’d been well past in my second year at art school. The living was damned easy and they didn’t need me becoming the voice of their collective conscience.
In the days after this first visit to Sloane Square I found out more about Nigel Samuel’s history and background. His father had been the socialist property mogul Howard Samuel and, when he committed suicide, Nigel had inherited close to half of London. As Miles, who was about the closest to him, told it, ‘When Nigel was about thirteen [his father] took him to Switzerland and stayed at some fancy hotel, and he was being shown how to drink wine, smoke cigars, all that stuff, and one day his father just went out and drowned himself in the lake, leaving Nigel just sitting there, utterly fucked up. Traditionally, every year, around the anniversary of his father’s death in October, he always goes a bit loopy.’ I’m not sure it was October right then, but as I recall it, the nights had started to draw in.
Matters were complicated by the fact that Nigel wasn’t only incredibly rich, but his wealth came with a lot of Byzantine political ties. Howard Samuel had been a major financial backer of the Labour Party, and the estate was administered by no less a person than Lord Goodman, Harold Wilson’s implacable personal lawyer; between the time of his father’s death and Nigel’s coming of age, Goodman had effectively controlled his life. Nigel developed a venomous loathing of politicians, and his involvement in the underground was almost certainly his way of using his wealth to stick it to a power elite. I always figured that, although confused in the extreme, Nigel’s heart was in relatively the right place, but his judgement of character left a lot to be desired.
