God Crazed Hippies Reap Boffo B.O.

August 3rd. Henny Youngman up there on teevee rat-tat-tatting the David Frost studio audiencd, with old stand-up comic Thompson�s Motif-Index of FolkLiterature re-hashes. Rat-tat-tat the robber who went into the Chinese restaurant and said �give me all your money� and the little Chinese fella behind the counter says �to take out?� rat-tat-tat. Then there were the six rough-trade hippys who motorcycledup to a diner and went inside and started taunting this truckdriver So the truckdriver gets up and leaves and one of the hippys says to the counterman �he isn�t much of a man, is he?� and the counterman says �he�s not much of a truckdriver either — he just backed up over six motorcycles.� And the ever-present violin, old slick-haired vaudeville Jew and that sere obsidian get-the-money string of one-liners and toppers 1902ff. Massachusetts, introduced by Frost in Copacabana voice of limousines and satin Times Square older than teevee.

Commercial. Piano player. Mike Metelica and Ronnie I forget his Jast name from the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune in Warwick, Massachusetts, introduced by Frost in some vague allusion to the pianist preceding them. Frost asks about the commune. Well,

there ar.£ two hundred some odd people presently in the commune trying to grow with one another and to maintain contact with the forces of Creative Energy and to attune their lives to those forces.

Henny Youngman keeps interrupting with �How do you pay the rent? Where do you get your money from?�

Metelica won�t give Youngman a straight answer, starts talking about �auras� and helping neighboring farmers. Reincarnation.

�Yeah, but how do you pay the rent?� Everybody in the audience is cracking up by now.

Station break cuts in on fading laughter and Metelica explaining that he�d like to talk more about reincarnation. After the station break, Frost assures him. After the station break, Frost introduces William B. Williams, who shares the rest of the air-time with Henny Youngman.

�HEY, MAN, WHAT�S ALL THIS �SPIRIT� SHIT?�

The previous July 2nd, the day of the Frost Show taping, most of the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune had

ventured down to New York City for a march up Fifth and Sixtti Avenues that was to culminate at 170*0 Broadway, where the Metromedia Records (Spirit In Flesh�s label) offices are located. Everybody meets in Washington Square Park early that morning. There�s a big pile of Spirit In Flesh placards. The Spirit In Flesh mob are milling qjpout. There,�re Spirit In Flesh balloons. (Practically the entire Spirit In Flesh publicity campaign has been completely the product of the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune. Months previous to the album�s release, silk-screened posters with Metelica�s dashing mug and the hand-lettered words �SPIRIT IN FLESH� had appeared miraculously glued to an unbelievable number of walls and street-lights around the metropolitan area. The commune had begun to flood radio stations with phone calls about Spirit In Flesh. They�d also taken to flooding Metromedia�s switchboard with inquiries as to why the album wasn�t being released yet, hunh? More of this matter anon.) David Peel is there hanging around. A few of the St. Marks Place alkies are there. Beautiful brownhaired woman slugging on the old Calvert�s in the fantastic sunshine and an old black wino stumbling along, �What�s all this �spirit� shit?� Short, squat starryeyes comes over and says �Hi,� which I have since learned is the most commonly uttered expletive of the commune. �Hri* �Dija hear the Spirit In Flesh album?� Yup. Blah blah blah. Everyone in the commune has absolute undifferentiated faith that the Spirit In Flesh album will change the world. But what if it doesn�t? I ask. �Oh, but it will.� Yeah, but, you know, what if, by some gnarl in the stemma of manifest destiny, it doesn�t? She looks at me in patronizing bewilderment. �It has to.� This is the commune party line. No bouts adout it, Spirit In Flesh is gonna change . the world.

ITINERARY

Aug. 16 The Warehouse; New Orleans, La.

Aug. 25 — The Factory; St. Louis, Missouri

Aug. 27 rCivic Center; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Sept. 22 — Carnegie Hall; New York, NY

�TALK TO ME��

They�ve got this super beezarro cripple in the commune who they wheel around in a wheelchair. He�s all palsied and scuzzy-looking with this antenna pointing out from his forehead. It�s held on by some kind of headband. There�s a re-converted oujia board hooked up over his lap — it�s got the alphabet, �yes� and �no� squares and the inscription �Talk To Me.� He �talks� by hitting his antenna-tip to various portions of the alphabet board. Say �rubber baby buggy bumper� five times fast. Hey, Carmine, c�mere and take a look at this. Abklingen.

The march up Fifth Avenue was pretty neat. No incidents, though. A bunch of �Hi�s. They consume a lot of garbage, though, for people in touch with the highest energy force in the universe, I mean. Lemon ices. Orange �drinks.� Sodas. If they really ever do make the big time, athletes might be in. jeopardy of their soft-drink advertising monopoly. �...Hi, I�m in touch with the Highest Energy Force In The Universe. This? It�s the Un-Cola . . . (and then they could have that beezarro cripple; spell out �7-Up� on his character grid). . . �

Upon reaching the main entrance to 1700 Broadway, they all converged in this big circle and began chatting a medley of Spirit In Flesh stuff. When 1 whipped out my cassette machine a series of pimply pusses assaulted, osculi agape, its meagre microphone apparatus with rasping monosyllabic spiels of perpetual high and cosmic one-ness.

Above —

Below—

Upstairs, a little while later, I�m in a room with Michael Metelica and Ronnie Whatsizname, fresh from their David Frost taping. The trusty old tape-recorder�s on the desk in someone�s unoccupied office. I�m nervous, Michael�s wary. I start off by asking him about the consciousness level he refers to so often, can he describe it? {Aside: Back in the 1960s, as the ISB would say, when I was a mere college drop-out, I was, to say the least, quite big on energy-levels and chromosome damage and transcendence and stuff. Although I have since forsaken these more esoteric preoccupations for a life of, as my dear mum once put it, �just fooling around and hiding behind a bottle,� I have retained the patois of the ars arcani for retaliative use among the intimidating spiritual hoi polloi of the outer Sephir.) OK. Well, first let me say that

N^ichael Metelica is one of the most mesmerizing, magnetic people I�ve ever come up against. Put him in a room and he�ll beam openness and love into every brain-eye there. An amazing, amazing person. Now, I�m not being qualitative here, because, as far as I�m concerned, Michael may be just a unique psychotic. I�ll bet my pretty blond locks, though, that he�s absolutely sincere and beneficent in all his words and intentions. He just sort of pinned me with those eldritch fantastic baby-blues of his and told me that when he was very young, in a grade school classroom, he was on his way from his seat to sharpen his pencil at the pencil sharpener at the front of the room and Zomp ! it hit him — fabulous eerie visions of lives paSt, future manifestations and total lovely flowingness of universal life/death continuum. Scared the shit out of me, he did. He told me things that he asked me not to reveal in print. They were about past life-form manifestations that he said might be construed as some kind of hype. He agreed that there were other auro-gangs emitting high levels of lifeenergy. They, though, themselves weren�t in touch with the outermost sphere of consciousness as were Spirit In Flesh. In my own no-pushee no-shovee way, I�m trying to get him to acquiesce to Little Richard and Archie Shepp and their holy stature of godfuck and flow. Nothing doing. Spirit In Flesh is the centrifugal force of the contemporary ethnoastronomical universe in flux (they don�t talk that neat, but I try to condense it and make it sound better). I ask the question for the umpteenth time that day. But what if Spirit In Flesh don�t catch the human race by the midbrain? But it will. The old Socratic full-pitcher analogy. But it wilt. Echoes of 1966 peace/love time-loop Maharishi Mahesh Yogi trying to muzzle in on Mia Farrow�s nookie and heroin Medicine Ball ■(� . . . lots of naked girls . . . �) Caravan radio commercials. But it will. Hence the amount of thryoxin produced may remain the same.

�HI! ARE YOU A DISC JOCKEY?�

On Saturday morning, July 31st, Metromedia bus�d a bunch of people out to the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune in Warwick. Splendidly hungover from an all-nite debauch in the bowels of the lower West Side, the Air Raid Kid and myself boarded the rented bus parked in front of 1700 Broadway.

Jon Tiven wore a green jumpsuit. Toby Mamis grinned. A few women from the commune served as hostesses. The long journey into the nether regions of Massachusetts was lightened by Mamis� spirited readings from The Quotations of Chairman Mao and the rendering of Tiven, the 16 year-old editor of The New Haven Rock Press vsend 25$ for a copy to: NHRP, 528 Lambert Road, Orange, Conm-06477), into a state of public drunkeness, one of my favorite pastimes.

We dis-embarked the autobus to resounding cries of �Hi!� There were signs up on the trees. �No Drugs.� �No Booze.� And, yes, �promiscuity� was a no-no, too. I was taken on a tour of the communal house (built by the commune themselves — nice job, too!), had my decadence expounded upon. I had �a lot of potential,� though.

Everybody asked, �Are you a disc jockey?� No one was asked less than say, seventeen times, �Hi! Are you a disc jockey?� People started hiding behind shacks and shit to escape conver-r sation. Within an hour, �Hi! Are you a disc jockey?� had developed into a running joke among the potato saladscarfing, conversation-refugees who chanced to meet in the more clandestine reaches of the commune grounds.

We didn�t get to hear Spirit In Flesh perform that afternoon because we were supposed to go see the Dead in New Haven. Should have stayed* Anyway, upon leaving, I/we were accosted by the same woman who had acknowledged my �potential� earlier. �But you seemed to have so much potenial,

Nick.� Yeah, I know, but I gotta go, my friends are leaving. �Well, then, go ahead, but you�ll be sorry; you owe it to yourself to hear Spirit In Flesh.� Don�t make me feel guilty. �I can�t make you feel guilty, only you can make you feel guilty.� The car pulls away. Zomp! It�s one of them at the wheel, and an hour-and-a-half ride ahead of us. Beautiful long red flowing hair. Glad I�m not in the front seat. We get to fall out rain pitter-patter 6n the windows in the back seat, Tiven up front talking to Mr Energy.

�RIVERSIDE SONG�

The Spirit In Flesh lp, Spirit In Flesh (Metromedia MD 1041) doesn�t get much airplay on the radio, I don�t think. Alex Bennett of WPLJ-FM in New York: ..ems to have set the reactionary (technical sense, buddy) tone to their �publicity campaign� (flooding the station�s switchboards and all that) by downmouthing them as �punks,� with an aside to the effect that Metromedia Records (who�d almost gotten sued by the city for the commune�s poster-posting orgy) shouldn�t be held in responsibility for the group�s punkness. (A motion that I wholeheartedly endorse; Barry Shaw of Metromedia is responsible for bringing The Holy Modal Rounders into the public eye, big-timewise, a move which will bring more loving raunch energy to the Universe than a thousand energy-level punks.)

I like �Riverside Song,� which I Think �is one super-fine aw-reet cut. The whole scam, though, is that Spirit In Flesh doesn�t grid re musick, but, rather, in terms of literally turning around the course of civilization. Well, it�s just Heraclitus and panta rei and if Heraclitus couldn�t bend the carbon cycle scene in three thousand years, these guys sure aren�t going to do it overnight.

I mean, it seems like a whole lot of naivete for a bunch of kids who put restrictions on people (remember those signs I was telling you about?) and who don�t even eat non-honko food to expect to change the monster divine Universe, literally, when there are true red line shifts the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, who�s had one hand on a shot glass and the other hand on some Einsteinian dimensional warp for fifteen years, and Archie Shepp, who could play thirty-two racks of 9-ball with Ra and come out on the money side every time, stalking this planet in overall unacknowl^dgement.

Last line: What we�ve got here is a cross between Jesus Christ and Florence Foster Jenkins and everybody knows Jesus sucks.