The piece gave What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? a huge boost. More episodes were ordered for 1968, and WGBH allocated a $200,000 budget for the show.
David Silver, the accidental English professor, was suddenly a celebrity. “I couldn’t walk anywhere in Boston or Cambridge without being stopped,” Silver remembers with a smile. “I would go places and give talks. I talked to the Harvard Club. I talked to the American Association of Psychologists and Psychiatrists. People couldn’t get enough.”
“I was literally a groupie,” Peter Simon recalls. “It was the first TV show that spoke to the stoned generation, ever.” Simon, the younger brother of singer-songwriter Carly Simon, was BU News photo editor at the time. He would host a potluck dinner where everyone would get fed, stoned, and then watch “as if God was speaking from the heavens.” Meanwhile, due to Silver’s work visa, he had to continue teaching at Tufts, though they reduced his workload to one class a semester. “I was a star teacher for two years,” Silver says. His thirty-odd students would critique every show in class, until at last he’d tell them it was time to return to Herman Melville.
In the Globe, WGBH program director Michael Rice called What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? “the Mister Rogers of the 18 to 25 generation.” Barzyk had a different take: “I’m trying to create noise in the system, because I think noise itself is good.” Understandably, tension was mounting between station leadership and the show’s far-out creators. But at the start of 1968, Barzyk and Silver were untouchable. “They could not step on Fred’s toes,” Thorne says. “He got away with everything.”
“Your program and you have annoyed me quite regularly,” one letter read. “If Mr. Silver is a symbol of the youth of today, preserve me from them.”
As the show’s popularity grew, it booked bigger guests, including Frank Zappa, William F. Buckley, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Bill Cosby. But the boldface names didn’t distract from the creators’ devotion to the unpredictable. Silver says that Barzyk “knew more than I did. It was a show about how I reacted to this stuff.” Karen Thorne adds, “As soon as the cameras started rolling, David was electrifyingly entertaining.”
One week, Silver would be delving into “warlocks and spiritualists”; the next, he’d be interviewing adolescents on how they consumed and created media. “Hey kids, your eyes see farther than mine do,” Silver’s voice-over announces, over B-roll of teens messing with radios. “They scan the world, don’t they? All those stations on the dial. An endless pattern of extension. Sense extension. The third eye. Twenty-one inches. The third ear. AM and FM. Stereo. They aren’t wasting any time. They’ve started already. The radio stations are already being built. Meet Deni Choi, 14 years old, man of the media.”
CHOI: They say on the packaging that legally you can only broadcast up to ten feet, legally. But they put the legally part in quotes. So they know you’re not going to stick to the ten feet.
SILVER: What do you hope to broadcast?
CHOI: Music. Continuous music. Especially a group called A Twist of Time.
SILVER: That’s a local group?
CHOI: Uh huh.
SILVER: What are you going to call the station?
CHOI: WLSD. On the high end of the band.
Back to Silver’s voice-over: “Sorry kids, but the FCC says you can’t transmit quite like that. That’s a no-no. Big brother’s listening. Go back to your Tinker Toys.”
“I wanted to do parties as episodes,” Silver says. After some misfires, Barzyk and Silver put together the “most outrageous” bash they could imagine: an episode framed as a party for Vietnam War veterans and protesters. Barzyk decorated Studio A with all manner of military props: trunks and swords, cannons and guns. Some of it was theatrical, some of it actual equipment from the army. Approximately twenty-five collegiate draft resisters and twenty uniformed servicemen were on set, getting tipsy on complimentary booze before the cameras rolled.
The tape of the episode has been wiped, but Silver re-creates it. He sat between the protesters and the servicemen. There was little hostility, but both groups started out fairly quiet. “At some point one of the resisters moved over to the other side and just sat with the military guys,” and Silver encouraged people to cross lines and sit anywhere they wanted, as a Stones record played. By the end, a small bit of mutual understanding was achieved. “We’re getting it,” a twenty-three-year-old corporal said to Silver on air. “We knew there were protests but it’s hard to understand it when you’re out there in a paddy field getting shot at.” Later the director learned that this episode had made the show a target of army intelligence surveillance—the curious onlookers allowed to watch from the control booth, many snapping photographs, weren’t just fans, as it turned out.
Meanwhile, at home, Karen and David’s life outside of the public eye was becoming just as surreal as their fan-filled strolls down Mass. Ave. “I remember being with David and I closed my eyes and opened my eyes,” says Thorne, now a professional psychic. “I saw our Egyptian bodies kind of astrally floating in the air. I saw our spirit bodies, the Ka and Ba. I woke David up and told him and he said, ‘Don’t even tell me because you’re starting to freak me out with this shit.’” This retelling jogs her memory. She recalls a chilling episode with a local personality.
“I don’t remember his last name. But it was Mel. Who was a guru. In . . . Roxbury?”
“Mel Lyman,” I say.
“That’s right. . . . Mel was not a nice guy.”
* * *
• • •
THE AVATAR EPISODE of What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? was shot entirely on film and preedited for airing on WGBH. There is no live studio footage, nor any of Silver’s usual direct addresses to the camera. It’s basically a twenty-five-minute documentary, opening with footage of Avatar hawkers in Harvard Square. This was late January or early February 1968, just as the obscenity arrests and trials were winding down.
“Would you like an Avatar?” Paula Press, a recent teenage addition to the Fort Hill Community, asks a young man walking by.
“No, I think all boring papers should be censored. Avatar is so boring.”
“Well, that’s only a personal opinion,” Press counters.
“Mel Lyman couldn’t be God because he doesn’t write well enough.”
“Boston’s underground newspaper Avatar was busted,” explains Silver in voice-over, “like all good underground newspapers should.”
The camera crew visits Avatar’s production office, located at 37 Rutland Street in Boston’s South End, to meet the team dedicated to bringing the paper to the people.
Like the Rolling Stone piece, the episode is structured the way the Fort Hill Community intended it to be structured. That is, they purposely keep the interviewer away from Mel at first, introducing him to assorted members who, by design, inflate the legend of Mel so that by the time the interview happens, the audience is practically dizzy with anticipation.
“‘Avatar,’ as far as I know, means the bringer of new messages or a kind of spiritual rebirth. What is Avatar?” Silver asks a staffer.
“It’s like the spirit of God manifested on Earth. This is a tangible manifestation of spirit. That’s exactly what the paper is.”
“You have something, though, that draws you all together, I’ve noticed,” Silver cautiously proceeds. “What is that?”
“It’s mostly embodied in Mel.”
Upon each subsequent mention of Mel, the footage is interrupted by a photograph of the Fort Hill guru looking messianic, and accompanied by the sound effect of a camera clicking.
An unidentified young man tells Silver, “Mel is putting himself up on a pedestal telling people, ‘I am the truth.’ He’s trying to get a reaction from people and I think the reaction he’d like to get is people saying, ‘No, you’re not the truth. You’re not God.’”
Next, Silver trekked up to Fort Hill where he was given a tou
r of the community by Eben Given, the artist whose work adorns most of the Avatar covers, and who Silver describes in the episode as “Guru #2.” Karen Thorne, who usually accompanied her beau for the taping of every episode, abandoned the film crew once they arrived on the Hill. “They heard I was psychic,” she recalled. “They were kind of afraid of me. And I was afraid of them.”
Set to a recording of Mel’s banjo music, Eben Given and Faith Gude unlock the Hill’s tower and bring Silver up to the top viewing deck. Given points out which houses the community owns, which one he lives in, and which one is Mel’s. Silver is impressed with the view of the city. Given says it’s been two years since the Fort Hill Community got their first house.
Silver does his best to make sense of who’s who during his tour of the Hill, but is never quite sure. Showing footage of some kids playing indoors, Silver adds, “These definitely, I think, are some of Mel’s children.” One of the kids reads a poem from Avatar, written by Jackie Lyman, Mel’s daughter. After establishing that Mel loves candy and that the community publishes a newspaper, Jackie’s poem perfectly captures the duality of life inside the Fort Hill Community in the space of two lines.
We are a big funny family.
The hill is good and bad.
Another unnamed man eloquently explains that Mel is “our theologian. He is reminding us of our spiritualism. That’s his job in the evolutionary scale of man. Your job, David, is finding out what’s happening and bringing it to the people.”
The Fort Hill Community finally led Silver and the camera unit into the kitchen to meet Mel Lyman. The community, anticipating some kind of misrepresentation by the show, documented the interview themselves too. About fifteen people were crammed inside the kitchen of 4½ Fort Ave. Terrace. A galaxy of Family member John Kostick’s star sculptures hung from the ceiling. George Peper photographed the scene; a tape recorder was rolling in the corner as well. Paranoia was running so high they didn’t even wait for the show to air before publishing the entire interview transcript in the next issue of Avatar. Besides private footage belonging to the community, this is the only known film of Lyman in full-on guru mode. He stares at Silver with the intensity of a supernova, takes forty-second pauses to answer questions, and remains eerily contrarian at every turn. Compared with the Lyman seen in Murray Lerner’s Festival documentary, this incarnation is almost unrecognizable. Like a bizarro counterculture version of the Frost/Nixon interviews, Silver chain-smokes and interrogates the man who claims to be God.
SILVER: When you’ve said you’re God in the Avatar, what are the different ways in which this has affected people?
LYMAN: A lot of people want to tell me that they’re God, too. I get a lot of letters saying, “Well, if you’re God, I’m gonna be God too, man.” That’s all right. I arouse something. At least somebody wanted to be part of what I said I was part of, or wanted to be what I said I was. It’s very strong.
SILVER: If people resented the fact, and people do, of one individual calling himself God and using that word, why do you think they resent it?
LYMAN: ’Cause they haven’t the courage to call themselves that and then live up to it. That’s the hard part.
SILVER: What’s the initial step?
LYMAN: Birth.
SILVER: Why birth?
LYMAN: ’Cause it’s first.
SILVER: You mean that existence—
LYMAN: Boy, you sure got a mind. Whew, how can you stand it?
SILVER: Well, I’m trying to, I’m trying to think. Um—
LYMAN: (interrupting) I mean if you get all these things explained to yourselves, do you feel any better?
The whole affair has the air of Alice being taunted by the Cheshire Cat. Silver’s usual confidence and brash sense of humor are nowhere to be found in this footage. In fact, halfway through, the host is so stressed out he starts to feel ill.
SILVER: Sorry, I’m sick to my stomach. Could I have some milk?
GEORGE PEPER: Here, have some Pepsi, it’s better for you.
LYMAN: We all use Pepsi up here.
Lyman can even make a brand of soda sound ominous. The episode aired with the title “Mel Lyman and the Avatar.” In the last few minutes, Silver coaxes a series of concrete beliefs out of Lyman, including his insistence that a change was coming to planet Earth in 1968. Later in the year, Lyman would declare the precise start date of the Age of Aquarius—an astrological period of two thousand–plus years promising an evolution of consciousness and newfound unity on Earth—and mark its arrival with his followers from the Hill.
SILVER: Do you think 1968 is a holy year? Do you think we’re in a holy age? Do you think we’re entering the new second coming era?
LYMAN: Yes.
SILVER: What evidence can you give me? What are the signs, what are the manifestations of this, around us?
LYMAN: This community, it’s the most obvious one.
SILVER: And outside this community?
LYMAN: The Avatar. You know what the word Avatar means?
SILVER: Uh huh. Are you the Avatar, or is the Avatar more than you?
LYMAN: It’s not more than me, no, and sometimes I’m the Avatar, and sometimes I’m asleep.
At one point he asks Mel, “How real do you think I’m being with you?” To which Lyman replies, “You’re being realer all the time.”
It was this interview that caused Jim Kweskin to dissolve the Jug Band and move permanently to the Hill. Fifty years on, David Silver refuses to comment on this episode, or anything related to Lyman and the Fort Hill Community.
* * *
• • •
BY EARLY 1968, David Silver knew that his future lay not in academia but in some form of show business. A talent agent named Richard wanted to represent Silver, who demurred. One day Richard called the TV host and said there was someone he wanted him to meet. An hour later, Silver heard a knock on the door. It was Van Morrison. Unlike many people in Boston at the time, Silver knew exactly who Morrison was without hearing him sing “Brown Eyed Girl.” Silver made tea, and when they finished, they switched to beer. He told the singer, “I’m a Rolling Stones fanatic, a Yardbirds fanatic, and the only other band in the same league is Them.”
Morrison humbly accepted the compliment and said he enjoyed Silver’s show. They spent the next few hours talking about being the same age and trying to make it in the United States. “We had a lot in common!”
Despite Silver’s lavish praise, Morrison expressed fears about his faltering career. Massachusetts hadn’t exactly embraced him. Silver was encouraging. He told Morrison that Cambridge—now his home as well—was exactly the right place to be, even if the storied local folk scene was now on life support. The endorsement of Cambridge, in particular Club 47, by artists like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Dave Van Ronk was hugely important to Morrison—it was one of the reasons that Morrison chose to flee there. But the scene’s last gasp was during Morrison’s Massachusetts residency, and his transition from rock-band front man to the pastoral, acoustic sound of Astral Weeks reverses what was happening in Boston’s music scene at the time.
That afternoon, Morrison confessed to Silver about being scared no one would take notice of him in Boston. Maybe he should leave. Silver, incredulous that he was offering career pointers to one of his favorite singers, told him to stick around. He would end up as one of the greats. Morrison thanked the TV host for the advice and headed back to Green Street.
* * *
• • •
MEANWHILE, BARZYK AND SILVER were playing with different episode formats. Why not, Barzyk wondered, try to do the show live?
“Good evening,” says an oddly agitated Silver on a WGBH set made to appear as a busy newsroom. “The reason you saw that bit of fakey film there to start off the show is that it’s a parody of a news show. I’m sick and tired of ordinary news shows and this one is my thing!” Silver throws to a preta
ped interview with Bill Cosby. Silver tries to gloss past the stale jokes his co-broadcaster, Russell Connor, offers in between segments. Silver smokes. Silver reviews the new Bob Dylan album, John Wesley Harding, comparing Dylan to Yeats. The “Apartment of the Week” segment just consists of footage of a run-down house in Somerville. “If you’re a hippie in Cambridge who’s being busted,” Silver says, “go and live in that place.” Behind him, people can be seen answering phones and bashing on typewriters. It’s not clear if anything they’re doing is real.
Silver reads an article about a motion from the United Nations to ban LSD. “For God’s sake, there’s a lot going on in North Korea,” Silver ad-libs. “What the hell are they doing talking about LSD?” Barzyk throws to a prerecorded segment where the host visits a head shop selling pipes and underground newspapers: Ramparts, Image, Inner Space, Avatar. Back in the studio, a woman holds up a record of “Some Velvet Morning” and tries to smash it with a hammer. Barzyk cuts to footage of two kids dancing to the music.
“That was by Nancy Sinatra,” Silver explains. “I say it was by Nancy Sinatra, but it’s not really by Nancy Sinatra, because she’s got false hair, false nose, she had her cheek bones shaved, and she’s got false boobs! How false can you get?”
Fifty years later, Silver notes, “And that’s why they took my show off the air.”
“That moment?” I ask.
“Yes, well, and maybe what happened next.”
Cohost Russell Connor admonishes Silver for being hard on Sinatra. Silver shrugs it off and introduces Professor Howard Zinn for a “guest editorial.” The show cuts to a pretaped speech by Zinn in which he vividly rails against the Vietnam War. It was unheard of to feature this kind of direct antiwar sentiment anywhere on television, and even for those viewers used to the surreal rhythms of the David Silver show, it must have been a shock.
“How can we justify giant, powerful America bombarding the peasants of a small Asian country to force them to accept a corrupt and cruel government which they themselves are unwilling to fight for?” Zinn asks. “How can we justify this? Only by lying to ourselves or having our leaders lie to us.”
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