Every Picture Tells A Story... Don't It

Every Picture Tells A Story... Don't It

LOONEY TOONS

DAVE MARSH

BY

PART ONE

Spent some time feelin� inferior Standin! in front of a mirror Combed my hair in a thousand ways But I came out lookin� just the same

— Rod Stewart

That month off did me a lot of good, I think, and I hope it�ll show up here.

There are certain times when everyone�s thinking has a certain congruence: our concern right now, for example, seems to be with fascism. Control vectors seem to converge on every side and almost all the people I know feel wedged in by it. Not immobilized but really wedged.

I don�t really want to talk about the government�s fascism, though, because that is oft-discussed, and the remedies are already in motion, to a great extent, among ourselves. On the other hand, the fascism and the deviance in the counterculture away from the sound, humane principles on which it began is being avoided and shirked. That�s what seems to be important and worthy of discussion right now. I�m gonna try, as feebly or as strongly as I am able, to give some sense of what I�m going through and maybe, with a little dialogue here and there, we can all get something out of it.

One of the things I was fortunate enough to stumble upon and read this fall was a book written in 1968 called Bomb Culture. The book was written by a British beatnik/avant-gardist (the William Burroughs/Alexander Trocchi art scene of the London 60s) named Jeff Nuttall. Bomb Culture is an attempt to describe the early British underground: not the scene that existed after Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Sgt. Pepper brought the avant-garde art world to the surface in Britain, but rather the community and scene that these things erupted from.

This is where Yoko Ono, as the most public example, came from. John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, the Who, the Kinks, the Stones, the Pretty Things and even the Beatles had all been on the fringes of belonging to this community, when they were in art school, but instead deserted it for the more populist (and economically viable) school of pop musicians then forming. This was probably the downfall of the literary/artistic avant-garde, because an avant-garde is by nature elitist. By bringing this scene into public view, rock and roll destroyed its cultish nature.

What Nuttall�s book does, though, is give us an idea of what these people were thinking of, trying to accomplish, throughout the fifties and sixties. (His attempt to give a sense of the history of 19th and 20th century avant-garde art movements is less successful, because it is less immediate, and almost boring.) He calls it a Bomb Culture because he sees it arising as a response to society�s �death wfsh,� symbolized primarily by atomic weaponry.

What is really astounding, however, is the almost precise parallels one can draw between events in the avant-underground and in the later, pop-overground. The most striking example is this:

We were eaten up by repressed violence, and we were soured by the constant terror of inconceivable violence being committed on ourselves and the rest of man. From this we had strugglingly produced a culture. It�s possible to get hysterical over the obvious connection between that culture, as it stood in 1965 and the Moors murders. I did. It�s possible to get carping about it. Pamela Hansford Johnson did. It�s possible to pretend that it doesn�t exist. That�s rubbish. Romantics, symbolists, Dada, surrealists, existentialists, action painters, beat poets and the Royal Shakespeare Company had all applauded De Sade from some aspect or other. To Ian Brady, De Sade was a license to kill children. We had all, at some time, cried �Yes, yes,� to Blake�s �Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire.� Brady did it. There were other connections . . . the Moors murderers had fallen in love, made their love into a delusion of inviolability, and, as I believe, made a fetish of the license they thought this afforded them. There were a good many of us doing the same thing at the time, daring, sexually and emotionally, what would have been unthinkable in the fifties, when we still had our political hopes. A good many of us were trying, like Mailer, to move out of deadlock by breaking all taboos.

The spectre of psychedelic fascism first came into discussion — at least among people I know — last summer, just before Ed Sanders� startling The Family came out. It began with discussions of parallels between the Manson Family and Boston�s Lyman Family and soared from there. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was aware that the alternative culture we had been building was as sick as the culture it was supposedly an alternative to.

The Family is1, obviously, at this point, the most important work of journalism to come out of the counterculture. It is certainly the most authentic, paling Tom Wolfe�s condescending, glib attempts at capturing us, more comprehensive than anything written by anyone else.

This is not entirely surprising. Sanders comes from the American wing of that avant-underground Nuttall speaks of, and he is one of its most prolific, inspired members. A prime mover in. the early Lower East Side community, where he ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, he also edited Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, the only magazine which was ever suppressed cn basis of title alone, and was a leader of the Fugs, to this day one of the most outrageous accumulations of people ever to set foot on a stage. He is also a fantastic poet, hilarious clown, scintillating wit. Even a decent singer on his own, with his ultrascatalogical Sander�s Truckstop shortly to be followed by a second album. Sanders knows what he is talking about.

Rather than tempting us-with tales of chop-chop and creepy-crawly, The Family challenges us to come to terms with the sickness in the vaunted youth culture. Even in focusing on a single set of incidents and people — the Charles Manson personality/death cult — The Family can�t detach itself from this over-riding problem: what to do about the shards of our vision that keep poking us in the heel. We�re not unlike the frozen characters in the opening moments of Dylan�s �Visions of Johanna�:

Ain�t it just like the night to play ■

Tricks when you�re trying to be so quiet?

We sit here stranded

Though we�re all doing our best to deny it

The Manson family, Sanders emphasizes, was not an isolated group. We can enumerate some of the other elements of �psychedelic fascism.� (I�m not sure precisely where that phrase comes from; it�s like the first time someone said �That�s not where it�s at.� It�s in the wind, you know?) Scientology. The Process. The Lyman Family. Fascination with black magic and occult paraphenalia, for purposes of human manipulation. The food fascists, with brown rice waved like a flag in front of �carnies,� coming on like macrobiotics would wash your very sins away. Hare Krishna (yes, George, Hare Krishna). Jesus Freaks, not half so funny as tragic. Even over-righteous leftists.

Take a look. Everyone has The Answer. The Rock Fascism League proudly posits the old jams, nothin� else, as THE ANSWER, the Only Viable Solution to The Dilemma. Almost any source allows only one answer, and if there is only one answer presented, if there�s only one way out of the maze, only one way that all the pieces fit together, you can count on it being a cart of what I�m trying to talk about. �One is the loneliest number that you�ll ever do.� It�s big. Huge. Monstrous. One.

Just as Nixon and Agnew can come to symbolize the fascism of the established order, heroin can symbolize that of the new. Jesus Freaks and Scientology and the Lymans are all wide open for heroin addicts and it always works: they don�t shoot smack anymore. But is anything really any different; One wonders if one curse isn�t merely replaced with another. Burroughs, in Naked Lunch, states it clearly:

�If soma ever existed, the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old JUNK.

Junk is the ideal product . . . the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary, The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy . . . The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

... The face of �evil� is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows no limit or control. In the words of total need: Wouldn�t you?

You can dismiss this as silly or overdrawn, I guess. Or maybe you could have, a few months ago. Until things like this began popping up:

�/ was very frightened, sure, � he admitted later at his New York hideaway. �I said I was leaving the day before and they said I wouldn�t be allowed to. They said they�d be watching me 24 hours a day. So I was super-paranoid, super-cautious. But that doesn�t bother me. / mean, they owed it to me, in a sense, to keep me on the hill.

�If I grow enough, someday l may come back. I care about Mel Lyman more than anyone else outside myself; someday I may be able to care about him more than me. �

Paul Williams in Rolling Stone�s Mel Lyman story, Part One

The most important point that Sanders makes in The Family is that we have to start dealing with these plagues that infect the vision we once had of a viable, humane community of sane people. We have to talk about how �acid victims� are created, who preys on them and how, the techniques used to control people, be it through solipsism, or drugs or verbiage or mere, oldfashioned Pavlovian brain-washing techniques.

The straight press couldn�t possibly have understood this most important function of Sanders� book, and thus it bad-rapped it, completely missing the point. The Family isn�t really about the Tate-LaBianca murders, or even the Manson Family half so much as it is about the sickness which infests the counter-culture.

(Concluded next issue.)