Zinn concludes with support and admiration for those who refuse “to cross the sea to make war on the people of Vietnam.”
“Thank you, Professor Zinn,” Silver says. “I agree with every word you said.”
Skip Ascheim hailed the episode in the next issue of Avatar: “For one hour, television actually woke up and lived a little, breathed real air from the outside world almost completely unfiltered.” But the mood inside WGBH was grim. D.C. and Boston had seen the episode live; program director Michael Rice told Barzyk that what they’d done was unacceptable. “We’re embarrassed,” he said. “This may be the end of the show.” Barzyk feigned mild concern. The two colleagues had a love-hate relationship, and Barzyk knew how to push Rice’s buttons. Now he wondered how to respond.
“This is an experimental show and you can’t win if you don’t lose!” he cajoled. “You have to have disaster so you can do something better!”
Rice called his bluff. He proposed having their sit-down conversation about the appropriateness of the show’s content on the air as a live, new episode—maybe the finale—of the series.
“Let’s do that,” Barzyk said, his eyes lighting up.
* * *
• • •
“THE FACT THAT I HAVE THIS is a miracle,” Silver tells me, cuing up the episode that would decide the fate of the show. “I would’ve thought they would’ve wiped this one.”
The WHMS? logo appears, but without any psychedelic rock playing over it. There’s no music at all.
“What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? has been seen at this time for about sixteen weeks. Today we’re going to talk about what in fact has happened, especially to last week’s program. I’m Howard Spergel of WGBH’s Unit One. We’re in the Boston studio where What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? has originated from the start. Joining me is Fred Barzyk, who has produced and directed the programs, Michael Rice, who is responsible for deciding whether WGBH will continue the Silver series, Robert Smith, program manager of WETA in Washington, and of course, David Silver himself. Michael, would you like to begin?”
Rice asks both Barzyk and Silver if they have any feelings about the previous episode; both pretend he’s just asking about its artistic merits. “I think experiments never succeed totally,” Silver deadpans. “They can’t.”
Barzyk and Silver execute this sort of masterful ballet dance around Rice’s questions throughout the sixty minutes, intentionally misunderstanding the intent of the queries. In fact, the duo had conferred beforehand and even developed a strategy that included the director, David Atwood. Barzyk told him that “every time they even get close to the concept of shutting the show down, or even making us look bad, just cut to one of us, either Silver or myself, and we’ll radiate the idea that we were being censored.”
Rice looks annoyed. “I must confess that the questions of artistic success or failure of that particular show are of less importance to me just now, but rather specific things or attitudes that were said or displayed on it.”
Silver goes for the “it wouldn’t have been controversial in the UK” defense, but Rice cuts him off. “You draw no distinction between yourself, how you handle yourself personally on camera, and the extent to which you do so in private with your friends?”
“One shouldn’t divide the two so totally that there’s no relation to the two. The question of swearing on camera. I don’t know whether or not I swore last week. But, uh . . . why shouldn’t we use these words on television? What’s wrong with it, really? We use them in private life!”
“Well, there was a devastating attack on a public entertainment figure, for example,” Rice says, moving through his list of the episode’s crimes. At the twelve-minute mark, the elephant in the room is finally addressed. The entire controversy, it seems, hinges on the authenticity of Nancy Sinatra’s breasts.
“Well,” Silver squirms, finally cornered with the direct charge, “what do you want me to say about that?”
“Well, let’s say that a good number of people found that gratuitously insulting.”
“Well, a good many found that it was perhaps telling it like it is.”
Barzyk interjects with a smoke screen. “David was performing a function not only as an individual who was trying to say something, but also as an interlocutor for the format. In other words, David and I had rehearsed in the afternoon, and the kind of presentation of the material we had was unsatisfactory to me. We found that one of the things that would give it a certain amount of vitality was to make David mad, as a performer.”
“But on the other hand he wasn’t acting a part. He was David Silver,” Rice counters. The hand on the meta-meter is going in circles at this point: Here is a show that’s airing an episode in which the show itself is on trial—and within that episode is a serious investigation into whether the host of said TV show is a real person or a character.
Silver suggests the idea of ending future shows with a note about his opinions not reflecting the station’s beliefs, to which Rice replies that the issue is “whether we want anything to do with you in the first place.” WETA manager Robert Smith is even harsher, comparing the content of the show to “more like what we’d get on skit night at a summer boys’ camp.”
The issue of Howard Zinn’s brutal anti-Vietnam editorial is an afterthought, addressed near the end of the debate. Smith believes it should have been followed by an opposing opinion, while Rice calls it an eloquent presentation of a point of view.
Then Rice sums up: Whether he likes it or not, David Silver is now a public persona. Silver, he contends, has commandeered WGBH for trivial purposes.
“I think that’s a melodramatic way of looking at it,” Silver protests.
“I think it is significant that we end this discussion on what is basically a point of disagreement,” Spergel concludes. “Thank you for being with us.”
I ask Barzyk if having his professional credentials questioned by his superior on television was awkward for him. “To me it was the height of the entire series!” he says. “All drama is conflict. This episode was theater.”
Letters in support of Silver flooded the station; Avatar mocked Rice for being hypocritical and full of “newspeak.” In the end, Michael Rice let the show remain on the air, with the proviso that they never broadcast live again.
* * *
• • •
SILVER STAYED, and the next episode, on February 7, was the brain-bending double-TV-set experiment—the show’s wildest installment yet. In Avatar, Skip Ascheim described how, during the interview sequences, “Channel 2 closed in on [Richard] Schechner’s face and 44 showed you Silver listening, but you couldn’t be sure the two images came from the same time or place. . . . Here the technology ran far beyond my neurology. The only thing missing was a picture of yourself watching.”
You can practically see Ascheim’s mind floating away.
“I never quite felt it before, but television is made of electricity,” he wrote. “You really can’t even touch it.”
Silver hung on for a while. But in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, WGBH found itself playing a key role in keeping Boston calm. Pressure mounted on Michael Rice to make room for programming for and by the African-American community. Whether or not funding for Silver and “black television” truly became an either-or choice for WGBH, they certainly used it as a way to wrap up the Silver circus.
Rice told Barzyk that WGBH was going to take the money from the Silver show to develop a program called Say Brother—with Barzyk as consultant. “The Love Revolution, the hippies, the drugs—our show was a good way to reflect all that on television,” Barzyk says. “Civil rights was clearly going to take center stage, so it made total sense to create room on air to address it.”
The final episode of What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? was a “masterpiece of camp,” according to the Globe, featuring “a gang of sweet old ladies dashing
about the city with violin cases trying to gun down Silver. In an ending similar to Bonnie and Clyde or that other pop-show of violence this year, the Democratic National Convention, they succeeded.”
Somewhere inside that swan song was a sequence in which Silver and Karen Thorne are sitting up in bed. She’s naked, her breasts exposed. WGBH aired the scene unedited, and Thorne believes hers was one of the first nude bodies on television. This small milestone aside, David Silver was devastated that the show had come to an end. “There was something there in Boston for me that was completely unique in my life,” he reflects. “Not just being famous for a little while or having a little bit of power. There was something about the camaraderie and the community in the late sixties. I was a part of this community. I was awed by it. I loved being there. It was like a total joy to be in the United States. It felt like home to me.”
Silver and Thorne got married in 1969 and had a daughter together, but split up a few years later. Thorne is now a professional psychic; Silver’s varied career includes writing the documentary The Compleat Beatles, working at Warner Brothers, and hosting a mindfulness podcast. In 2000, The New York Times credited the Silver show as a key influence in the birth of video art. Silver agrees that he had an active role in the counterculture, adding, “I constantly felt like I was in a dream.”
Fred Barzyk can still remember one incident that might have contributed to his partner’s surreal feeling. In a Christmas episode, Silver walks through Boston Common, past trees lit up for the holidays. Two young women approach, recognizing him from somewhere.
“You’re not real,” one of the women says. “You’re supposed to be on television.”
David Silver answers curtly, “I’m real.”
FOUR
Paul Revere Is Shamed; Being a Brief History of the Bosstown Sound
THE MEMBERS OF BEACON STREET UNION were taken aback by how quickly things were moving for them in late 1967. The band had formed less than a year before, and none of them had expected much to come of it. After recording an album with a well-known producer and hearing rumblings that the LP would be released on a label, they would periodically leaf through Billboard magazine at a newsstand in Harvard Square to learn how the music industry worked.
One day, drummer Dick Weisberg opened to a full-color ad announcing “The Sound Heard ’Round the World: Boston!!” The woodcut illustration depicted Revolutionary War soldiers with a mushroom cloud on the horizon:
Where the new thing is making everything else seem like yesterday.
Where a new definition of love is helping to write the words and music for 1968.
Three incredible groups.
Three incredible albums.
The best of The Boston Sound on MGM Records.
The ad listed three bands: Beacon Street Union, Orpheus, and Ultimate Spinach. “This was not making sense to us,” Weisberg says. “It was like we were going crazy. We were like, ‘Is this us?’”
This was how Beacon Street Union learned the name of their album, and that it was coming out on MGM Records. They had never heard of the other two bands.
Soon, A&R men from major labels would try and sign their own Boston Sound band. But within a year of the Billboard ad, the acts associated with the “Sound” would sport a spectacularly bruised reputation, and MGM’s marketing campaign became an evergreen lesson in how not to sell new music to fans. The members of the various Boston Sound bands were hardly to blame: Unless you happened to know someone who had dealt with the record industry, there was just no way to educate yourself on the potential pitfalls. And with the threat of the Vietnam War draft looming, the kids of the Boston Sound glimpsed a dream and tried to grab it.
* * *
• • •
BEFORE WARNER BROTHERS’ Joe Smith descended the narrow stairs of the Catacombs to hear Van Morrison perform in Boston in the summer of 1968, he had been hard at work on the opposite coast. RCA Victor had signed Jefferson Airplane in 1965, and Columbia had just snatched the rights to re-release Big Brother and the Holding Company’s debut album. In 1967, Smith was sent to sign the Grateful Dead for Warner Brothers. “They did so much acid that it was very hard to separate reality from make-believe with them,” Smith recalled. Jerry Garcia told him he wouldn’t understand the music unless he dropped acid with them, but he took a pass. “I wouldn’t breathe around them,” he later explained. “Wouldn’t drink anything. Wouldn’t eat anything.” Smith left San Francisco with his psyche intact and a deal with the Dead.
There was little doubt that these three acts belonged to an organic, homegrown scene, a community of fans and bands that epitomized Flower Power. In March 1967, the San Francisco Chronicle hailed the city as the “Liverpool of America,” an impression deepened four months later when George Harrison spent one August day walking around Haight-Ashbury. Where connections to the Beatles could be found, there was money to be made. But the Bay Area’s talent pool had already been fished clean by the major labels. You can picture A&R reps gazing at a map of the United States, wondering: Where next?
During the mid-sixties, Boston was home to two acts that seemed poised to break out: Barry and the Remains, who had toured with the Beatles and released their debut on Epic, and the Lost, who were briefly signed to Capitol and toured with the Beach Boys. Both groups had recently folded, though, and no other area act looked like their obvious successors. At the same time, the lines between popular-music genres were blurring; styles of songwriting were falling in and out of favor on an almost weekly basis.
The changing lineups at George Papadopoulos’s Unicorn Coffee House on Boylston Street traced the path from Dylan’s rebellious act at Newport to the spring of 1967: collegiate folk giving way to garage rock, then morphing into something harder to define. A local DJ, WBZ’s Dick Summer, hosted a night of live music every Monday at the Unicorn. He invited WBZ’s program director, Al Heacock, to come by. Heacock dubbed the new psychedelic sound “liquid rock” and instructed Summer to play one liquid rock song per hour on his show. (“The name was the only thing he got wrong,” Summer said.)
Meanwhile, Ray Paret, who had studied aeronautical engineering at MIT, and David Jenks, a cabbie who daydreamed about designing album covers, started Amphion, a music management agency, in a building owned by the Christian Science Monitor, directly across from Symphony Hall. One night, Paret and Jenks stopped at the Unicorn to hear a band that Heacock would have definitely classified as liquid rock. They were called Underground Cinema.
Clad in a white robe and sporting a pageboy haircut, the front man delivered cryptic instructions in a monotone over a bed of ambient noise:
See the glazed eyes . . .
And know the warmth of the hip death goddess.
The band kicked into a lazy, hypnotic groove as a rail-thin eighteen-year-old named Barbara Hudson approached the mic to sing the lines written by her bandmate Ian Bruce-Douglas, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of the titular deity. Like a New England Nico, Hudson sang about the illusion of reality and how she was the mysterious girl of your dreams.
“We didn’t like the name that much but they had a certain chemistry,” Paret says. “Ian Bruce-Douglas was well spoken, talented. The rest of the group was a bunch of hicks from the Cape.” That night, Amphion found its first band.
* * *
• • •
AT SIXTEEN, Ian Bruce-Douglas Wise enrolled at Berklee School of Music in Boston on a DownBeat magazine scholarship, but soon transferred to the University of Virginia. In Virginia, Ian started to write music, inspired by Dylan and Richard Fariña, whose performances back in Boston had made a deep impression on him; suicidal, he left school and moved back to his parents’ house on Cape Cod, where his band Underground Cinema was born.
After seeing the band at the Unicorn, Jenks reached out to a man named Alan Lorber, whom he had met through a friendship with Lorber’s brother. Lorber was a successful New York producer and ar
ranger, of a mainstream kind: think Brill Building, not Haight-Ashbury. He’d later boast that his previous hits had garnered $50 million in record sales and that he was by Phil Spector’s side when the “Wall of Sound” was born. (In his varied career, he had once written a handful of songs with Brooks Arthur, future engineer of the Astral Weeks sessions.) Lorber agreed to check out the Boston band. Dressed in jacket and tie, Lorber was impressed by their live show, but like Paret, he didn’t care for the name either.
Bruce-Douglas and Lorber arrived at a verbal agreement that night at the Unicorn. Could anything be done about the . . . name? The singer had an idea. A few months earlier, he had obtained some pure LSD and had taken a solo trip alone in his bedroom. “I started looking at myself in the mirror and my face was doing funny things,” Bruce-Douglas recalled. “I had a bunch of colored markers I used to draw with. I grabbed a green one and started drawing all these psychedelic designs on my face. When I was done, I looked at myself and said ‘Whoa! I am ultimate spinach. Ultimate spinach is me!’”
Bruce-Douglas was Ultimate Spinach, and Ultimate Spinach was him, sure, but all together he, Lorber, Paret, Jenks, and the hicks from Cape Cod would work together to formulate “The Sound Heard Round the World.” All they needed now was a record label.
* * *
• • •
BRUCE ARNOLD AND JACK MCKENES were booked at the Carousel on Cape Cod for a string of gigs, performing as the Villagers. The owner had offered to let them sleep over in the restaurant. During the day, Arnold and McKenes were expected to fill in as short-order cooks; at night, they’d shower off and perform live music for the patrons. When they were excused from their daytime duties for consistently burned burgers, they also lost a place to bed down. The Villagers didn’t mind sleeping on the beach as long as it wasn’t raining.
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