Primitive Wisdom For Sale

Primitive Wisdom For Sale

Books

Ed Word

ROLLING THUNDER

by Doug Boyd (Random House) WIZARD OF THE UPPER AMAZON by F. Bruce Lamb (Houghton Mifflin)

Bob owns a bookstore on San Francisco’s Union Street, a drag containing more guru-human-potential shucks per square foot than any other street in the country. (One of Bob’s biggest sellers is - get this - Das Energi, Paul William’s classic collection of psychedelic fascist epigrams.) I visit Bob every couple of weeks to see what’s hot with the selfimprovement set and ch^t about this and that. Bob turns me on to some very good books on occasion, too. This last time, he pressed a copy of Wizard of the Upper Amazon into my hands, saying “This guy is gonna be the new Castaneda.’’

And a new Castaneda would help sales, too, what with oF Carlos jumping off the cliff on the last page of Tales of Power, leaving the reader to assume that there won’t be any more don Juan books. I mean, those chic Union Streeters really eat up that primitive wisdom shit. So I suspect that over the next couple of years we’re gonna see lots of shamans and gurus crawling out of the woods - literally doing their schtick and doing the Carson Show.

Still, neither Manuel Cordova-Rios nor Rolling Thunder will be among them. Cordova-Rios, the abovementioned wizard, is actually nothing of the sort. Captured by Brazilian Indians in 1902 while on a rubber-cutting operation, he was initiated into the tribe, and eventually became next in succession for chief. Wizard of the Upper Amazon is mostly taken up with the details of daily life within the tribe, which details include the consumption of a hallucinogenic vine called Banisteriopsis caapi, yage, or ayahuasca, depending on who you talk to. Imbibed in a watery paste, the drug gave the Indians visions of the animals they were going to be hunting, the potential dangers of the upcoming hunt, and splotches of blue and green. Cordova-Rios eventually assumes the leadership of the tribe, but splits as soon as it is, convenient and goes back to Peru, where he is now a well-known healer, thanks to the techniques he learned from the Indians. Unfortunately, this angle of the book is just tossed off in the last couple of pages, since he has only been a full-time healer since 1968. Still, the jungle lore is real vivid, and the Indians sound like pretty neat folks.

Rolling Thunder is a whole nother thing, however. A real McCoy Shoshone medicine man with honest-tothe-Great-Spirit, Meninger Clinic-tested powers of precognition and healing, he is also one of the West’s better-known warriors for Indian rights and the sanctity of the old teachings and culture. Doug Boyd, who authored the book, met Rolling Thunder at the Meninger

Clinic, where he was investigating a number of “primitive” techniques of altering reality, and quickly decided that this guy was worth spending some time with. As soon as he could find time, he ran off to Nevada, where he found that Rolling Thunder was off doing his other gig - brakeman for the Southern Pacific.

Boyd spent 'several months off and on with Rolling Thunder, gathering herbs with him, sneaking up on government tractors which wdre pulling down acres of Indian-owned pinon trees (pinon nuts are the Shoshones’ main source of protein) , and attending Indian conferences in San Francisco. There is even a confrontation between Rolling Thunder and some hippie geek who has some power he’s trying to use to trash the Grateful Dead. All in all, there are tons of anecdotes here, and, like Castaneda, you never get the feeling that Boyd is going to blow it by-telling you too much. Rolling Thunder emerges as a mortal, complex human being with a lot to say about his people. And. unlike don Juan, you know he’s real cuz he’s got his photo on the dustjacket. Highly recommended.

COCAINE by Pitigrilli (And Or):: Coke-crazed degenerates rage thru 1920’s Paris in this resurrected classic of drug abuse. And, just like most cokeheads, it runs out of things to say well before it stops saying them. A bore and a half. E.W.

BLACK OPIUM by Claude Farrere (And-Or):: More dope pornography, this time downer stuff in a shortstory collection that has its moments. Hacking through the leaden turn-ofthe-century prose to get to them is another matter, however... E.W.

DOG SOLDIERS by Robert Stone (Houghton, Mifflin, Co.):: Certainly a timely hunk of fiction what with all that recent C.I.A. expose. Definitely

the first piece of art - jaded as it is -spawned by Vietnam. Distinctive furthermore as the first novel to deal with the post-psychedelic death settling in on young America. Yes, contemporary and hip as hell. But Robert Stone’s Vietnam-shook heroes' chasing the big smack deal are also just old Ahab and crew going down with another white menace. The human being as a hellbent loser with some sort of dignity instinct.

We each devise our own face-saving games - this one" may be a bit hairier than yours or mine, but no less plausible -and if we win (But it’s my own game!), it’s never by much. Read about us in great literature, as you soldier on through your dog’s life. R.D.

OKIES, SELECTED SHORT STORIES by Gerald Haslam (New West Publications) (Direct orders from publisher for $2.95 plus 30C handling to: Civic Center Box 4037, San Rafael, Calif. 94903):: This is a fine depression reader, and I don’t mean the one starting under.Herbert Hoover. The ten essays depict, using authentic Okie dialect and San Fernando Valley background, life among the lower classes of whities. It’s Merle Haggard stories without the tunes, three generations later than Steinbeck’s graped wrath.

T.M.

THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED by Ishmael Reed (Random House):: A sort of extended footnote to his wonderful Mumbo Jumbo (out in a Bantam paperback for $1.50), this brings HooDoo detective Papa LaBas to Berkeley to investigate the murder of a Gumbo tycoon. And much, much more... E.W.

THE IMPROBABLE RISE OF REDNECK ROCK by Jan Reid, photos by Melinda Wickman (Heidelberg):: The only survey of the Austin scene so far, which comes to the same conclusion as everybody in town has: if there is^ one, nobody’s seen it. Written in a ponderous, enervating style, it nonetheless smacks of absolute authenticity and casts an oblique light on the state of the “counterculture,” 1975. E.W.

WHAT DO WE HAVE FOR THE WITNESSES, JOHNNY? by Garry Trudeau (Holt, Rinehart & Win.ston):: The latest in the outrageous Doonesbury books features the appearance of several hundred Asian refugees in Washington. I suspect this series contains cartoons that never made It into the dailies, because some of these cartoons are savage. Essential if your local paper doesn’t carry Doonesbury, and not a bad idea even if it does. E.W.

(This month’s Off The Wall by Ed Ward, Robert Duncan and Tom Miller.)