Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Paul Krassner
Today’s podcast features one of the true heroes of the counterculture, Paul Krassner. In addition to leading the creation of our underground press, Paul was friends with important free-speech advocates such as Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. If you were alive during the so-called Sixties, you most likely remember his magazine, The Realist, that featured items for sale like the “Fuck Communism” bumper sticker and the “Disneyland Memorial Orgy” poster.
Paul Krassner’s Website
The Realist Archive Project
The day anti-Vietnam War protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon
October 21, 1967: Antiwar activists’ satirical attempt to levitate the Pentagon
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
And as saddened as I am to have to say this,
00:00:27 ►
it appears that we are once again heading into a new darkening age where we humans continue to
00:00:33 ►
ignore the threats coming at us as the climate changes and instead we focus on fighting with
00:00:38 ►
one another. However, while the mass media fans the flames of fear, I think that there’s a better way to get through these days.
00:00:47 ►
With laughter and humor.
00:00:49 ►
Keep a smile on your face and make the bastards wonder what you’re thinking.
00:00:53 ►
What you’re thinking about them.
00:00:55 ►
So, we’re going to have some fun here today.
00:00:58 ►
And you may remember that this past summer I commented on the death of one of our nation’s historical figures, Paul Krasner.
00:01:06 ►
Now you may ask how a man who was primarily known for his humor became a historical figure,
00:01:11 ►
and if you had a few days free in which I can tell you his full story, I’d be happy to begin
00:01:17 ►
talking about him right now, but unfortunately neither of us has that kind of time, so I’m going
00:01:23 ►
to treat us to a few segments from some recordings of his talks.
00:01:27 ►
And in this podcast, you’re going to hear about some of the more humorous political activities that he instigated and promoted,
00:01:35 ►
and I hope that you’ll give some thought to all that Paul Krasner did to make this world a little better and a lot happier.
00:01:43 ►
Now, one of Paul Krasner’s closest friends was
00:01:45 ►
Abby Hoffman, and in this podcast, we’re going to hear about several of their more famous capers,
00:01:51 ►
such as the time that they organized tens of thousands of anti-war activists to come to
00:01:56 ►
Washington and surround the Pentagon in a satirical attempt to cause it to levitate.
00:02:02 ►
And while I would like to claim that I participated in that event,
00:02:06 ►
I wasn’t there because at the time I was engaged in combat in Vietnam.
00:02:12 ►
So to begin our little excursion into the mind of Paul Krasner, I’m going to begin with a short bit
00:02:17 ►
in which he points out the importance of satire in political commentary.
00:02:24 ►
He made a poster in the 1950s with just two words
00:02:28 ►
on it. Fuck communism.
00:02:31 ►
He’s the only person in the world ever to win awards from both Playboy
00:02:35 ►
and the Feminist Party Media Workshop. So there it is. We’d like to
00:02:39 ►
invite Mr. Paul Krasner to the podium.
00:02:49 ►
Thank you.
00:02:51 ►
First, I want to quash a rumor that’s been going around that the Society for Ethical
00:02:58 ►
Culture was founded by Tom DeLay.
00:03:01 ►
Not true.
00:03:13 ►
delay. Not true. And I don’t know if you saw George Bush’s speech today, where he boasted that since 9-11, 10 attacks have been prevented by al-Qaeda, which of course was a signal to al-Qaeda today, so that if you
00:03:27 ►
haven’t heard, there is a new level of alert, a higher alert on the New York subways.
00:03:36 ►
Did anybody come by subway today?
00:03:39 ►
Uh-huh.
00:03:40 ►
Oh, did you feel safer because there was a green alert or whatever color it was?
00:03:44 ►
Oh, did you feel safer because there was a green alert or whatever color it was?
00:03:48 ►
I think the speech was written by Karen Hughes,
00:03:56 ►
who was the first one to teach Bush that he shouldn’t call terrorists folks. I, in terms of satire, you know, it comes from the contradictions and the hypocrisy.
00:04:11 ►
And a recent example of that is after Hurricane Katrina, the, well, first of all, the federal government has always, in cases like medical marijuana in California and dying with dignity in Oregon has said,
00:04:26 ►
well, federal law supersedes these state referendums, referenda.
00:04:35 ►
And states’ rights, it’s not just for racists anymore.
00:04:40 ►
But after Katrina, they started saying, oh, no, no, it’s the state, it’s the local, because they’re just covering their asses.
00:04:50 ►
Between the government and the corporations and the military and organized religion,
00:04:55 ►
there are so many asses being covered across America now that it looks like a Christo art project.
00:05:07 ►
a Christo art project.
00:05:14 ►
But speaking of medical marijuana is a good example of the hypocrisy
00:05:18 ►
because the Partnership for a Drug-Free America was funded and founded originally by the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies
00:05:23 ►
and tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. And so, because they don’t want any competition,
00:05:27 ►
because, you know, the, well, first of all, there are all these commercials on TV for
00:05:34 ►
pharmaceutical prescriptions, which they tell you to ask your doctor if such and such a
00:05:42 ►
drug is right for you. I have a list of about 15 prescription drugs now.
00:05:47 ►
I save them up because I don’t want to keep bothering my doctor.
00:05:50 ►
But all of them have side effects
00:05:54 ►
that are worse than what they’re supposed to cure.
00:05:57 ►
So, you know, if you get Lipitor for your cholesterol,
00:06:00 ►
one of the side effects, I think, is anal leakage.
00:06:03 ►
If you take Prozac for depression,
00:06:07 ►
one of the effects is suicidal impulses.
00:06:12 ►
My favorite is Provacol,
00:06:15 ►
which promises that it will prevent your first heart attack
00:06:19 ►
and prevent your second heart attack,
00:06:22 ►
which means that when you have your first heart attack,
00:06:25 ►
you’ll think it’s really your third.
00:06:32 ►
But they say that, well, medical marijuana,
00:06:34 ►
the movement has just served as a wedge
00:06:37 ►
for the decriminalization of all marijuana.
00:06:40 ►
And they say, and then, you know, it’ll become out of control
00:06:46 ►
because they’re worried, you know.
00:06:49 ►
High Times magazine once had a questionnaire.
00:06:53 ►
One of the questions was, is it possible to smoke too much pot?
00:06:57 ►
And one of the readers sent in, he said, I don’t understand the question.
00:07:01 ►
He said, I don’t understand the question.
00:07:20 ►
But as an unbeliever, it’s interesting to me to see how much killing is done in the name of this deity that I don’t believe in.
00:07:23 ►
I mean, to me, Walt Disney was an intelligent designer.
00:07:30 ►
Incidentally, for those of you who remember the Disneyland Memorial Orgy I published in 1967,
00:07:37 ►
it’s been digitally colored and is available now on my website, paulchrassner.com,
00:07:42 ►
not to be confused with Bush’s website, which is crony.com. And so when you think of the administration, you know,
00:07:49 ►
I mean, Bush and Cheney, it’s long been known that Cheney is a ventriloquist,
00:07:54 ►
which is why he talks out of the side of his mouth like this. Never quite got the craft down.
00:08:01 ►
got the craft down.
00:08:04 ►
And Donald Rumsfeld, I have
00:08:07 ►
imaginary dialogues with these people.
00:08:10 ►
So I would
00:08:11 ►
say to Donald Rumsfeld, well,
00:08:13 ►
at Guantanamo Bay,
00:08:15 ►
the prisoners aren’t allowed
00:08:17 ►
to be in touch with their lawyers, let alone
00:08:19 ►
their families, and they’re there in these
00:08:21 ►
cages, and they have to
00:08:24 ►
spin. And he he says you don’t
00:08:25 ►
understand i mean he always asks questions in himself you know am i a mean-spirited prick well
00:08:30 ►
yes that’s a very subjective question you know so um i said to rumsfeld uh you know how can you call
00:08:37 ►
this uh freedom when look what you’re doing to these prisoners who haven’t even been charged with
00:08:42 ►
anything specifically and And he said,
00:08:45 ►
well, you know, they have more freedom than a lot of people in America. And I said, what do you
00:08:50 ►
mean? He said, well, they can go to Cuba and you can’t. I remember when Bill Clinton was president
00:08:59 ►
and he promised that he would end the ban of gays in the military. I don’t know why gays would want to be in the military.
00:09:07 ►
I don’t know why heteros would want to be in the military,
00:09:10 ►
or transsexuals, or bisexuals.
00:09:15 ►
But in any case, he was dissuaded from doing it by Colin Powell.
00:09:20 ►
Then we had the first African-American head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
00:09:27 ►
and he was saying the men in the barracks would feel uncomfortable if a gay man slept in the same barracks with
00:09:32 ►
them.
00:09:33 ►
And now Colin Powell, of course, came from a military family, so I would say to him,
00:09:38 ►
look, General Powell, isn’t this the same thing they used to say about blacks, that
00:09:42 ►
it would make the men in the barracks uncomfortable if a black man slept in the same barracks?
00:09:49 ►
And Colin Powell explained.
00:09:50 ►
He said, well, we never told anybody we were black.
00:09:56 ►
This was the forerunner of the don’t ask, don’t tell policy.
00:10:02 ►
So now, you know with
00:10:05 ►
the terrorist threat
00:10:07 ►
people don’t really get into the minds
00:10:09 ►
of the terrorists because
00:10:11 ►
you know we’ve all
00:10:13 ►
aside from any grievances they have
00:10:16 ►
they’re promised that
00:10:17 ►
as martyrs they’ll go
00:10:19 ►
to nirvana and meet 72
00:10:21 ►
virgins and also
00:10:23 ►
have orgasms that
00:10:25 ►
last 600 years.
00:10:29 ►
It’s impossible to conceive.
00:10:31 ►
With my luck, at 150 years
00:10:34 ►
I would have a premature ejaculation.
00:10:37 ►
Damn.
00:10:39 ►
So
00:10:39 ►
I’m going to end now because
00:10:41 ►
there are others here
00:10:43 ►
among us five white geezers who have satirical insights to share with.
00:10:50 ►
Thank you.
00:10:56 ►
Next, I’m going to play a short bit where he talks about the CIA, LSD, and the conflicts in the 60s between the hippies and the anti-war activists.
00:11:06 ►
And he also gives some well-deserved praise to his friend Abbie Hoffman.
00:11:10 ►
And as a little aside here, I’m going to point out a little trivia fact that only a true psychonaut will know.
00:11:18 ►
And for what it’s worth, I didn’t learn this myself until about 20 years ago.
00:11:22 ►
And that was when John Hanna edited the
00:11:25 ►
Spirit of the Internet for me, and he pointed out to me that while Abby spelled his last name
00:11:30 ►
H-O-F-F-M-A-N, Dr. Hoffman spelled it differently with one F and two N’s, H-O-F-M-A-N-N. And while
00:11:39 ►
this isn’t hidden information, not many people, myself included, ever notice the difference.
00:11:45 ►
So if anybody asks you what you learned from this podcast today, well, at least you have that.
00:11:51 ►
And as you listen to this next piece, I first want to read a short quote from Abbie Hoffman,
00:11:57 ►
and I think it should give you a little better idea of what the two of them were thinking back
00:12:01 ►
in the 60s. And I’m quoting Abbie Hoffman here.
00:12:07 ►
It’s the agitators that change society.
00:12:10 ►
It never changes from the top down.
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Those few individuals who are willing to risk careers,
00:12:14 ►
marriages, freedom,
00:12:17 ►
these are the people who change the world.
00:12:20 ►
And now let’s hear what Paul Krasner was also thinking back then.
00:12:23 ►
The CIA had originally planned LSD
00:12:26 ►
to be used as a truth serum
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or a control device.
00:12:32 ►
They wanted to control the population.
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But instead,
00:12:37 ►
young people started
00:12:38 ►
to experiment with themselves.
00:12:40 ►
They would deprogram themselves
00:12:42 ►
from the mainstream culture,
00:12:43 ►
but then reprogram themselves with their own value system. And so the whole CIA
00:12:50 ►
scenario backfired. They did it with such a sense of humor that people couldn’t
00:12:57 ►
figure out what’s their angle. You know, what do they want to get out of this? Do
00:13:01 ►
they want money? Do they want to sell something? And you know, they just wanted to spread joy and the sense of healthy rebellion against a
00:13:11 ►
constricting civilization. The free speech movement started because they wanted to,
00:13:18 ►
they didn’t want CIA recruiters on campus because the CIA was really behind the war in Vietnam and so they
00:13:28 ►
they felt it was not appropriate that they should try and recruit students it
00:13:34 ►
started out as almost an adversarial relationship because the political
00:13:39 ►
activists thought that the hippies were irresponsible you know there was a war
00:13:43 ►
going on and they’re just smoking dope in the park.
00:13:45 ►
But they came to realize that smoking dope in the park
00:13:49 ►
was a political act of civil disobedience
00:13:51 ►
against an unjust law.
00:13:54 ►
At the same time, the hippies thought
00:13:56 ►
that the political activists were just playing
00:13:58 ►
into the hands of the administration
00:14:00 ►
by protesting this war.
00:14:03 ►
But then the hippies began to see
00:14:04 ►
that the political activists were right too. They could see that there was a connection between getting arrested
00:14:09 ►
for smoking pot in this country and dropping napalm on kids on the other side of the world
00:14:17 ►
and burning them alive. San Francisco became a kind of Mecca and there was a sort of pilgrimage toward the west and it was like young
00:14:29 ►
a generation of pioneers who went west without killing a single indian along the way hippie had
00:14:36 ►
become such a media phenomenon so they want they’ve had a march called the death of hippie
00:14:42 ►
they wanted to be called free americans which you, a sweet little old lady wasn’t like to say, get a haircut, you free American.
00:14:49 ►
It was just in the air, this feeling of being like a blade of grass growing through the concrete,
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you know, and suddenly seeing the light and seeing others who were sharing in this
00:15:00 ►
kind of thing. You didn’t know exactly what to call it, but you knew you were breaking through
00:15:05 ►
something that had been holding you down. He was a natural leader, and he told me I wasn’t
00:15:14 ►
the leader because I didn’t urge people to do things, but he had a charisma about him.
00:15:19 ►
When I first met Abby, I told him how much he reminded me of Lenny Bruce.
00:15:25 ►
You know, he had this spontaneous, fearless wit.
00:15:28 ►
And, you know, he said, wow, really?
00:15:31 ►
He said, Lenny was my god.
00:15:33 ►
And so this kind of started an instant friendship with us.
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It worked.
00:15:40 ►
It became the headlines in Chicago papers that were like, yipes, the yippies are coming.
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So it was a myth that became a reality.
00:15:48 ►
At first there were 20 protesters indicted and eight cops.
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And then I was one of the 20, but then they wanted to have the scales of justice balanced,
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so they just limited it to eight defendants.
00:16:10 ►
defendants and um the trial was um a showcase for um to try and and display the difference between
00:16:18 ►
mainstream america and uh counter-cultural war protesters he was a target you know came out in and even in the nixon tapes uh so he he wanted to be an organizer that’s what he wanted he wanted to be an organizer. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to start a school for organizing.
00:16:27 ►
And, you know, when you’re in prison, it’s hard to organize.
00:16:33 ►
He wanted to be free, and he wanted to be free not for his own sake, but also so he could, you know, continue to rabble rouse.
00:16:49 ►
continued to rabble-rous. The lesson was, and that I learned, what the yippies and the pranksters and underground press, what they all had in common was our culture was our politics.
00:16:57 ►
Our culture was our politics. I think that best sums up the atmosphere of the anti-war movement
00:17:03 ►
in the 60s and early 70s.
00:17:05 ►
I remained on weekend duty with the Navy Reserve for several years after leaving active duty,
00:17:11 ►
and along with a few of my Navy friends, we demonstrated when we could without getting into trouble.
00:17:16 ►
So when we gathered at the Federal Building to throw our service medals on the steps,
00:17:20 ►
we didn’t wear our uniforms to the demonstration.
00:17:23 ►
But rest assured, there were
00:17:25 ►
hundreds of veterans involved in those anti-war demonstrations in Houston, Texas during the spring
00:17:30 ►
of 1971. Well, the final Paul Krasner recording that I’m going to play today may be from one of
00:17:37 ►
his last public appearances. This talk was given on November 5th, 2016 at the Historical Society
00:17:44 ►
in Desert Hot Springs, California, where he
00:17:46 ►
was living at the time. And in this recording, Paul reflects on some of his favorite moments
00:17:51 ►
as a political activist, satirist, and comedian by reading selections from some of his writing.
00:17:58 ►
So let’s join him now.
00:18:13 ►
What was a turning point in my literary life, I was doing for Man Magazine freelance pieces. And a few pieces that they said were too much grown up.
00:18:19 ►
And he said, my mother wouldn’t like it.
00:18:21 ►
And I said, well, your mother isn’t a subscriber.
00:18:34 ►
He said, I said, well, this was the publisher, William Gaines, who published my magazine.
00:18:37 ►
And he said that the editor thought that some stuff was
00:18:43 ►
not grown up.
00:18:47 ►
And I said, well, you mean,
00:18:50 ►
because it turned out that there were like a million and a quarter of teenagers and pre-teenagers who,
00:18:56 ►
and so, and I said, so you don’t want adults?
00:19:00 ►
And he said, no, I said,
00:19:03 ►
I guess you don’t want to change horses in midstream and he said
00:19:07 ►
and this just still rings in my ears and when he said not not when the horse has a rocket up its
00:19:15 ►
ass and this was the moment I realized that I was going to publish a satirical magazine for adults, because there weren’t none then, not at all.
00:19:27 ►
And so when I started publishing The Realist,
00:19:31 ►
a lot of books came out of that.
00:19:33 ►
So what I thought I would do here
00:19:37 ►
is just have a few little pieces to read
00:19:40 ►
and give the context that it was.
00:19:44 ►
The first thing I’ll read is just the opening of the book
00:19:47 ►
because I kept stalling and stalling
00:19:50 ►
and I finally did.
00:19:51 ►
Well, if I have an opening, then maybe I can continue.
00:19:56 ►
I first woke up at the age of six.
00:19:59 ►
It began with an itch in my leg, my left leg,
00:20:03 ►
but somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to scratch it. Although
00:20:07 ►
my eyes were closed, I was standing up. In fact, I was standing on a huge stage, and
00:20:13 ►
I was playing the violin. I was in the middle of playing the Vivaldi Concerto in A minor.
00:20:19 ►
I was wearing a little Lord Fauntleroy suit, ruffled white silk shirt with puffy sleeves, black velvet short
00:20:25 ►
pants with ivory buttons and matching vests, white socks and black patent leather shoes.
00:20:32 ►
My hair was platinum blonde and wavy. On this particular Saturday evening, January 14, 1939,
00:20:40 ►
I was in the process of becoming the youngest concert artist in any field ever to perform at Carnegie Hall.
00:20:46 ►
But all I knew was that I was being taunted by an itch, an itch that had become my adversary.
00:20:53 ►
I was tempted to stop playing the violin just for a second and scratch my leg with the bow,
00:20:58 ►
yet I was vaguely aware that this would not be appropriate.
00:21:01 ►
I had been well trained. I was a true professional.
00:21:04 ►
But that itch kept
00:21:05 ►
getting fiercer and fiercer. Then suddenly an impulse surfaced from my hidden laboratory
00:21:11 ►
of alternative possibilities and I surrendered to it. Balancing on my left foot, I scratched
00:21:17 ►
my left leg with my right foot without missing a note of the Vivaldi Concerto. Between the
00:21:23 ►
impulse and the surrender, there was a choice.
00:21:26 ►
I had decided to balance
00:21:28 ►
on one foot, and it was that simple act
00:21:30 ►
of choosing which triggered
00:21:31 ►
the precise moment of my awakening
00:21:34 ►
to the mystery of consciousness.
00:21:36 ►
This is me.
00:21:37 ►
The relief of scratching my leg was
00:21:39 ►
overshadowed by a surge of energy
00:21:41 ►
throughout my body. I was being
00:21:43 ►
engulfed by some kind of spiritual orgasm,
00:21:47 ►
by a wave of born-again ecstasy with no ideological context,
00:21:52 ►
no doctrine to explain the shock of my own experience, no dogma to function as a metaphor for the mystery.
00:22:00 ►
Instead, I woke up to the sound of laughing.
00:22:03 ►
I had heard that sound before, sweet and comforting, but never like this.
00:22:08 ►
Now I could hear a whole symphony of delight and reassurance, like clarinets and guitars
00:22:14 ►
harmonizing with saxophones and drums.
00:22:17 ►
It was the audience laughing.
00:22:19 ►
I opened my eyes.
00:22:21 ►
There were rows upon rows of people sitting out there in the dark, and they were
00:22:25 ►
all laughing together. They had understood my plight. It was easier for them to identify
00:22:31 ►
with the urge to scratch than with a little freak playing the violin. And I could identify
00:22:36 ►
with them identifying with me. I knew that laughter felt good, and I was pleased that
00:22:41 ►
it made the audience feel good, but I hadn’t intended to make them laugh I was merely trying to solve a personal dilemma so
00:22:49 ►
the lesson I woke up to is totally nonverbal internal buzz would serve as
00:22:55 ►
my lifetime filter for perceiving reality and its rules if you could
00:23:01 ►
somehow translate that word into words it would spell out one person’s logic is another person’s humor.
00:23:09 ►
So I was considered a child prodigy.
00:23:15 ►
And I didn’t think I was because I had a technique for playing.
00:23:24 ►
But I had a passion for making people laugh.
00:23:27 ►
And so I just decided that I would drive my violin teacher crazy.
00:23:33 ►
And it ended up at his best.
00:23:40 ►
So anytime you want to have me be a hitman, just let me know.
00:23:48 ►
So my life, that was the first thing of my life.
00:23:57 ►
Because although I was six years old, I had the feeling of just born, but I had six years of relative kind of sophistication,
00:24:13 ►
but I came with an innocence.
00:24:17 ►
And so I knew then I wanted to make people laugh.
00:24:23 ►
I didn’t even know that they were comedians.
00:24:26 ►
We didn’t, but I just, you know, if I could make my family laugh, I could make my mother laugh just by dropping a pencil on the table.
00:24:34 ►
And so I would do that. If she was mad at me, I would just drop a pencil on the table and she would forgive me.
00:24:41 ►
table that she would forgive me.
00:24:43 ►
So I ended
00:24:46 ►
up performing.
00:24:48 ►
I started
00:24:49 ►
using my violin. I came
00:24:52 ►
up when my teacher died.
00:24:54 ►
I just
00:24:55 ►
put my violin in the closet.
00:24:58 ►
And when I started
00:25:00 ►
at the age of about
00:25:01 ►
21, I started performing
00:25:04 ►
in places, but using the violin as a prop.
00:25:07 ►
And so I would play,
00:25:09 ►
I would ask,
00:25:10 ►
what did Adam say to Eve?
00:25:14 ►
And then I would play,
00:25:15 ►
don’t sit under the apple tree.
00:25:18 ►
This was before I got political.
00:25:22 ►
And so,
00:25:23 ►
and it was Lenny Bruce who suggested that I get rid of the prop of the violin and
00:25:31 ►
stop and use my real name.
00:25:32 ►
I was using my name as Paul Maul.
00:25:35 ►
And once again, there was a village gate in New York, which is where I first performed.
00:25:51 ►
And then I began to, during the Vietnam War, I was sort of like the peace version of Bob Hope,
00:26:03 ►
where we entertain the troops.
00:26:10 ►
And so I would, at rallies for civil rights,
00:26:17 ►
rallies and the anti-war demonstrations,
00:26:21 ►
and I would talk about it,
00:26:24 ►
but I would do it in a form of humor.
00:26:28 ►
And so I got a lot of practice at it because it was in the guise
00:26:32 ►
of a lecture, but I thought that… I learned
00:26:36 ►
that satire is, as opposed to
00:26:40 ►
comedy, that satire was a…
00:26:46 ►
It had a truth inside of the joke.
00:26:53 ►
So that it was sort of like pasta fazool,
00:26:57 ►
you know, where there was a bean for every macaroni.
00:27:02 ►
So it was always…
00:27:04 ►
I would see through the prism of absurdity on things that were,
00:27:13 ►
anything that was hypocritical or inconsistent or cruel,
00:27:18 ►
anything that I saw that in the media was what gave me something to be satirical about.
00:27:26 ►
And so here’s Lenny. Steve Allen was the first subscriber to The Realist.
00:27:34 ►
And he sent out a bunch of gifts of The Realist to a bunch of people, including Lenny Bruce.
00:27:42 ►
And Lenny Bruce sent a whole bunch of gift subscriptions
00:27:45 ►
to a lot of his friends.
00:27:48 ►
And so it was a Malthusian kind of increasing
00:27:52 ►
the subscribers to the realists.
00:27:55 ►
It was by word of mouth, which is the best kind of advertising
00:27:59 ►
because it’s free and you’re being told
00:28:02 ►
that something is good by someone you trust.
00:28:06 ►
It wasn’t an ad that would have all kinds of
00:28:14 ►
bait and switch or bitch and suede.
00:28:18 ►
Bitch and suede.
00:28:19 ►
So I’ll just…
00:28:20 ►
And so when Lenny came to New York to give me a call
00:28:24 ►
and I met him for the
00:28:25 ►
first time and he was in a hotel America in the Times Square oh I should say that
00:28:35 ►
at one point Hugh Hefner at Playboy assigned me to edit Lenny’s autobiography, which was titled, let’s see, what was the
00:28:49 ►
one that Dale R. Carnegie did? It was a book, a self-help book.
00:28:55 ►
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
00:28:57 ►
That’s right, How to Win Friends and Influence People. So Lenny’s title of his autobiography was Talk Dirty and Influence People, How to Talk Dirty.
00:29:08 ►
And so Playboy had me edit his book into six sections in Playboy, and then they published it as a book.
00:29:23 ►
And I was traveling around with him at a certain time.
00:29:28 ►
So Lenny was taking Deloited for his energy
00:29:33 ►
and had sent a telegram to a New York contact
00:29:36 ►
with the phrase, Deloited in Disguise,
00:29:40 ►
as a code to send their daughter’s prescription.
00:29:43 ►
Now in Atlantic City, Lenny got sick while waiting for that prescription to be filled.
00:29:48 ►
Later, while we were relaxing on the beach, I hesitatingly brought up the subject.
00:29:53 ►
I said, don’t you think it’s ironic that your whole style should be so freeform,
00:29:58 ►
and yet you can also be a slave to dope?
00:30:01 ►
And he said to me, what does that mean, a slave to dope?
00:30:04 ►
And I said, well,
00:30:05 ►
if you need a fix, you’ve got to stop whatever you’re doing. So go somewhere and wrap a lamp
00:30:10 ►
cord around your arm. He said, then other people’s a slave to food. Oh, I’m so famished,
00:30:17 ►
stop the car, I must have lunch immediately or I’ll pass out. And I said, you said yourself
00:30:22 ►
you’re probably going to die before you reach 40. Yeah, he said, but I can’t explain.
00:30:28 ►
It’s like kissing God.
00:30:29 ►
And I said, well, I ain’t going to argue with that.
00:30:32 ►
Lenny, though, he began to get paranoid about my role.
00:30:37 ►
He said, you’re going to go to literary cocktail parties and you’re going to say, yeah, that’s
00:30:42 ►
right, I found Lenny slobbering in an alley. He would have been nothing without me. Of course, I denied any such intention,
00:30:50 ►
but he demanded that I take a lie detection test. I was paranoid enough to take it literally.
00:30:57 ►
I told him I couldn’t work with him if he didn’t trust me. We got into an argument and
00:31:03 ►
I left for New York. I sent a letter of
00:31:05 ►
resignation to Playboy and a copy to Lenny. A few weeks later I got a telegram from him
00:31:11 ►
that sounded like we had been on the verge of divorce. It said, why can’t it be the way
00:31:16 ►
it used to be? And I agreed to try again. In December 1962 I flew to Chicago to resume working with Lenny on his book.
00:31:27 ►
He was performing at the Gate of Horn. When I walked into the club he was asking the whole
00:31:33 ►
audience to take a lie detector test. And he recognized my laugh. So Lenny was my first…Mortsall and Lenny Bruth were both my mentors, whether they knew it
00:31:49 ►
or not.
00:31:50 ►
They were different.
00:31:54 ►
Mortsall was very political and intellectual and Lenny was more biological and he would talk about politicians and their, well, for example, John F. Kennedy, you know,
00:32:11 ►
he would talk about their sexuality and, you know, such as Marilyn Monroe and other models.
00:32:20 ►
There was a lot of that.
00:32:21 ►
There was a lot of that.
00:32:27 ►
I mean, now it would be at a campaign.
00:32:29 ►
People say, well, you know.
00:32:33 ►
But then it was a taboo.
00:32:49 ►
None of the media was mentioning what he did with mistresses and she and his wife. It was just unknown by the, I mean known by the media, but not mentioned by them. Now it would be in the front page. So it was an interesting travel with Lenny Bruce because he had a he might have a throwaway line at a
00:33:11 ►
performance and then on another performance he would expand it to a
00:33:19 ►
minute or two and then over the over the weeks where he was performing it would he
00:33:25 ►
would have like a ten minute routine that he had and that’s how he did it it
00:33:31 ►
just evolved as he went along and so that was a lesson to me that then it was not just a static thing, that it would evolve as you perform.
00:33:48 ►
Okay, this was 1967, the Summer of Love,
00:33:52 ►
and when there was a lot of psychedelics.
00:33:59 ►
When LSD became illegal, the Psychedelic Oracle was an underground paper in San Francisco.
00:34:13 ►
The Psychedelic Oracle became politicized, and the radical Berkeley Bar began to treat
00:34:20 ►
the drug cell culture as fellow outlaws.
00:34:24 ►
So now there was to be an event in the nation’s capital
00:34:26 ►
that would publicly cross-fertilize
00:34:29 ►
political protesters with hippie mystics.
00:34:32 ►
The plan was simple, to defy the law of gravity.
00:34:36 ►
It was decided to hold a special ceremony which would levitate
00:34:40 ►
the Pentagon 100 feet.
00:34:43 ►
We applied for a permit and revealed to the media
00:34:46 ►
that Pentagon officials
00:34:47 ►
wanted to limit levitation
00:34:49 ►
to 22 feet.
00:34:52 ►
Because that was the height
00:34:53 ►
of their ladders.
00:34:56 ►
So they’d still be able
00:34:57 ►
to pull the building down.
00:34:59 ►
But later they insisted
00:35:00 ►
on restricting it
00:35:01 ►
to no more than 3 feet
00:35:03 ►
above the ground, and
00:35:05 ►
the press accurately reported that.
00:35:09 ►
In order to build up further interest in the event, we staged preliminary tracks that were
00:35:14 ►
bound to get media coverage.
00:35:16 ►
Abby Hoffman invented an imaginary new drug, a sexual equivalent to the police tear gas,
00:35:22 ►
Mace. It was Christian’s lace,
00:35:28 ►
supposedly a combination of LSD and DMSO,
00:35:32 ►
which when applied to the skin would be absorbed into the bloodstream and get an instantaneous aphrodisiac.
00:35:36 ►
Lace was actually Schwartz Disappero from Tywell.
00:35:40 ►
When sprayed, it left a purple stain and disappeared.
00:35:44 ►
A press conference was called at
00:35:45 ►
Abby and Anita’s apartment where lace could be observed in action. I was supposed to be there
00:35:50 ►
as a reporter who accidentally sprayed with lace from a squirt gun. To my surprise, I would put
00:35:57 ►
down my pad, take off my clothes, and start making love with a beautiful redhead who had also gotten
00:36:02 ►
accidentally sprayed, along with another
00:36:05 ►
deliberately sprayed couple right there in the living room while the journalists took
00:36:10 ►
notes.
00:36:11 ►
I was really looking forward to this combination of me and event and blind date.
00:36:16 ►
Even though the sexual revelation was at its height, there was something exciting about
00:36:20 ►
knowing in advance that I was guaranteed to get laid, although I felt somewhat
00:36:25 ►
guilty about attempting to deceive fellow reporters. But there was a scheduling conflict.
00:36:33 ►
I was already committed to speak at a literary conference at the University of Iowa on that
00:36:37 ►
same day, so instead of being accidentally dosed with lace, I was assigned by Addie to
00:36:43 ►
purchase cornmeal in Iowa,
00:36:45 ►
which would be used to encircle the Pentagon as a pre-limitation right.
00:36:50 ►
I was supposed to be a rationalist, but it was hard to say no to Abby.
00:36:56 ►
In Iowa, novelist Robert Stone drove me to a farm.
00:37:00 ►
I told the farmer I’d like to buy some cornmeal to go.
00:37:04 ►
Of course we’re fine, he asked.
00:37:06 ►
I glanced at Stone for guidance. He shrugged and said, well, since it’s a magic ritual,
00:37:11 ►
I would definitely recommend coarse. Coarse, please, I said to the farmer. How many pounds?
00:37:18 ►
Thirteen, please. The farmer smiled and said there was no charge. He was just anxious for us to get out of there.
00:37:29 ►
And so I flew back to New York with a 13-pound sack of coarse cornmeal properly stored in the overhead rack.
00:37:32 ►
Meanwhile, there were stories about lace in the New York Post,
00:37:35 ►
the Daily News, and Time magazine,
00:37:37 ►
including the promise that three gallons of lace would be brought to Washington,
00:37:43 ►
along with a large supply of plastic water
00:37:46 ►
pistols so that lace could be sprayed on police and the National Guard at the Pentagon demonstration.
00:37:51 ►
Meanwhile, the guy who substituted for me in the accidental sexual encounter with the
00:37:58 ►
beautiful redhead at the lace press conference ended up living with her.
00:38:02 ►
Even though I had never met her, I was jealous.
00:38:07 ►
Somehow I felt cheated. But the purpose of this was to… we didn’t have any advertising
00:38:18 ►
budget and so the thing was to give them something good that they could write about and quote from us naughty quotes.
00:38:28 ►
And it was a way of them having information
00:38:36 ►
about where we were going to go at the Pentagon.
00:38:42 ►
And so people who thought, well, the lace was going to be sprayed there
00:38:47 ►
because he policed the National Guard men put into action the slogan make love
00:38:56 ►
not war so it was a mutual mutual manipulation with the media.
00:39:07 ►
So one more little thing here.
00:39:11 ►
I was covering the Patty Hearst trial.
00:39:16 ►
In April 1976, on the same day that the Pope announced that he was not gay,
00:39:19 ►
that’s true, I mean, he did.
00:39:23 ►
I received a registered letter from the FBI informing me that I was on a hit list of the Emilian I have are in custody.
00:39:33 ►
I was more logically a target of the government than a New World Liberation Front, unless, of course, they happen to be the same.
00:39:42 ►
Was the right wing of the FBI warning me about the left wing of the FBI?
00:39:47 ►
Communicating from the New World Liberation Front charged that, quote,
00:39:51 ►
the pigs led and organized the ZAP, the POTA unit.
00:39:56 ►
Jacques Rouget, an above courier
00:39:59 ►
for the underground New World Liberation Front,
00:40:03 ►
told me that the reason I was on the hit was because
00:40:06 ►
I had written that Patty Hearst’s kidnapper, Donald C.Q. DeVries, was a police informer.
00:40:14 ►
And it was more than that.
00:40:16 ►
He also was a, not only was he a police informer, but he, for the FBI, COINTELPRO?
00:40:28 ►
That’s right, yes. COINTELPRO was short for the Capital Intelligence Program.
00:40:34 ►
And then there was a person named Colston Westbrook and he was a CAI he was in Vietnam in the assassination of
00:40:48 ►
groups there and he came back to the States and he became the handler for
00:40:54 ►
Donald the trees so it was not what is the book by Toobin now, or what’s his first name? Jeffrey Toobin. Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote a mean-spirited thing about Patty
00:41:10 ►
and never mentioned any of this.
00:41:11 ►
He was clueless about the real underbelly
00:41:16 ►
of the kidnapping of Patty first.
00:41:21 ►
Here it was.
00:41:23 ►
So when the other above ground courier
00:41:28 ►
told me that I was on the hit list,
00:41:29 ►
because I had written about Patty Hearst’s kidnap
00:41:32 ►
after I was a police informer.
00:41:34 ►
But that’s true, I said.
00:41:36 ►
It’s a matter of record.
00:41:37 ►
Doesn’t that make any difference?
00:41:40 ►
Not to him, I mean the documentation was irrelevant.
00:41:45 ►
He said, if the New World Liberation Front asked me to kill you, he admitted, I would.
00:41:51 ►
Jacques, I replied, I think this puts a slight dammer on our relationship.
00:41:57 ►
And so that’s what my daughter Holly and I moved to a new apartment without hearing
00:42:04 ►
that. I want to have some questions and answers here. The last time I did that was when I spoke before at the Rotary Club. I was invited there by a friend who asked me to do it. And I had a question and answer then, too, there.
00:42:29 ►
The first one who asked the question
00:42:31 ►
was the then city manager.
00:42:34 ►
And he said, so what do you think of our little town
00:42:38 ►
here at Desert Hodge Springs?
00:42:40 ►
And I had an angel on my shoulder that said, don’t say it.
00:42:48 ►
And the devil was on the other shoulder and said, if you don’t say it, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.
00:42:55 ►
And so I used to have retroactive, advanced retroactive.
00:43:32 ►
And so the devil won. And I said, well, the Desert Hot Springs is like a microcosm of the federal government. is corrupt and incompetent and there was silence and he realized and he really that he better laugh because the audience was looking at him and so when
00:43:38 ►
he left and everybody left, I’ll answer any question.
00:43:46 ►
Yes?
00:43:47 ►
Would you just tell us what your answer was when you were called the father of the Yippie movement?
00:43:57 ►
The Underground.
00:43:58 ►
Oh, you mean People Magazine, you mean?
00:44:02 ►
Yeah, called you the father of the…
00:44:04 ►
They called me the father of the Underground Press. Yeah, do you mean? Yeah, called me the father of it. They called me the father of the underground
00:44:06 ►
press. I sent a telegram
00:44:09 ►
saying
00:44:10 ►
that I demanded
00:44:12 ►
an eternity test.
00:44:17 ►
Couldn’t resist it.
00:44:21 ►
Yes.
00:44:24 ►
When I was in San Francisco, I was, I wanted to do, I didn’t like to say my own name somehow,
00:44:34 ►
and I said I would like to do the show and I would be called Rumble Forstin.
00:44:40 ►
And they said okay, they said that was fine.
00:44:49 ►
And so I tried to get my name in the San Francisco phone book and they said, well, no, we can
00:44:57 ►
say Forstin Rumpel. And I said, well, I couldn’t argue with them.
00:45:10 ►
But it was fun.
00:45:13 ►
It was fun having, and I started doing a syndicated column
00:45:20 ►
for the underground press before it became the alternative press
00:45:24 ►
and using that name and
00:45:28 ►
so it was i think i almost forgot that it was actually a rumble stilt skin
00:45:36 ►
somebody had a phone oh i want any story from the bus
00:45:59 ►
any story from the bus oh that there was a at the back of the bus there was a helium thing that we that they that uh hadn’t yet we get a big balloon and pushesers, and so Philip and Helia, and he would just give
00:46:09 ►
them out free. And one mother and her kid would be there, and she gave him a quarter.
00:46:18 ►
And Keith, he said, just to be sardonic humorous, he said, I’m a famous author.
00:46:26 ►
She said, oh.
00:46:26 ►
And she said, does that mean I bid you a dollar then?
00:46:31 ►
And he was really humble.
00:46:35 ►
You know, he’d be at a party with him,
00:46:40 ►
and he’d be in the kitchen, and somebody
00:46:42 ►
would come into the kitchen.
00:46:44 ►
And he was just, hi, I’m Ken. He really had humility even though he was a charismatic figure.
00:46:57 ►
But it enabled him to not let his ego get in the way of his relating to people.
00:47:09 ►
I heard a female voice before.
00:47:12 ►
Well, I was just going to say, talk a little bit about the Chicago, I don’t know, the 8 or 7, your experience.
00:47:47 ►
Yeah, when, let’s see, I guess it was in December of 1967, in December, and I was with Abbie Hoffman and his wife Anita and we got caught in a in a hurricane and we were going to go to see a movie that was Abbie’s favorite movie called
00:47:54 ►
The Professionals with, I’m trying to remember who was in it. But in any case, we did go there,
00:48:07 ►
but the rain was getting hotter and hotter.
00:48:09 ►
And we went to see the Ten Commandments, I think it was.
00:48:12 ►
The Dean of the De Laurentiis book about that.
00:48:17 ►
I remember on the way back, I was complaining about Abraham,
00:48:24 ►
who was going to cut his son’s head off or whatever he was going to do
00:48:29 ►
because that’s what the deity told him to do. And I said, well, that was just blind obedience.
00:48:36 ►
And Abby said, no, it’s revolutionary trust. And it was the kind of thing where
00:48:46 ►
we discussed religion.
00:48:50 ►
We felt always interested in religion
00:48:55 ►
and how there was war
00:48:59 ►
being on the base of religion often and so he had a lot of discussions like that
00:49:11 ►
it was really good company to be with he was we he was very and he would just
00:49:19 ►
like on lower east side where we live a police car would go by and there were two cops in the front and two cops in the back.
00:49:29 ►
And Abby would yell at them, are you guys going on a double date?
00:49:34 ►
He would play billiards with them at the police station. So he was really, I was fortunate having a magazine and meeting all these people that
00:49:48 ►
Abby and Keezy and Tivoli and Ram Dass and all of these people, I was very fortunate
00:49:57 ►
to meet these people.
00:49:59 ►
And I remember going to a party once where there were a bunch of gurus, and they were in the
00:50:06 ►
kitchen there complaining about their servants.
00:50:09 ►
And I said, this is, and it was like, I told them, this was like being at Patty Hurt’s
00:50:14 ►
house where the servants were complained about by her parents.
00:50:33 ►
parents. But it was always a pleasure meeting with these counter-cultural icons, really. So it was a lot of fun seeing how gurus would—there was one guru who spoke at the Village Theater in New York, and I was invited to
00:50:48 ►
go in the green room, and there were his servants using wild-root cream oil to get his long
00:50:56 ►
hair and beard.
00:50:57 ►
It was always interesting to see these behind-the-scenes.
00:51:00 ►
Any other questions what was the last time you fiddled with your fiddle
00:51:07 ►
Oh forget what year but it was like 40 years after I had stopped using it and I
00:51:17 ►
was there was a movie movie series called Billy what series called Billy Jack and what was the name of the guy who played it?
00:51:32 ►
Tom Laughlin.
00:51:33 ►
Tom Laughlin, yeah.
00:51:36 ►
Sorry.
00:51:37 ►
So I met him and he invited me to dinner.
00:51:43 ►
And he invited me to dinner.
00:51:50 ►
And he was a real, almost a zealot about Thomas Jefferson.
00:51:55 ►
And he had furniture from Jefferson.
00:52:01 ►
He had china plates from Jefferson. There were recipes he had.
00:52:10 ►
I think one was peanut soup that we ate. And he had Thomas Jefferson’s violin and he asked if I would play it. And I did 40 years, but
00:52:20 ►
I couldn’t resist playing Thomas Jefferson’s. So I took the violin in my hands, and I said, again,
00:52:31 ►
the devil went over the angel.
00:52:34 ►
I said, I’d like to dedicate this song
00:52:37 ►
to Thomas Jefferson’s slaves.
00:52:43 ►
And the only thing I felt competent to play was a twinkle, twinkle little star.
00:52:50 ►
I knew I wasn’t going to do the Bud Vivaldi concerto in A minor.
00:52:54 ►
So I played that and then as a private little joke, nobody even noticed, I scratched my
00:53:00 ►
left leg with my right foot.
00:53:03 ►
Just as a reminiscence.
00:53:09 ►
You did a lot of protesting and things and all that.
00:53:12 ►
Did you get arrested a bunch of times?
00:53:15 ►
How did that work out?
00:53:17 ►
I got arrested once for stopping at a red light, actually.
00:53:27 ►
A bunch of us
00:53:28 ►
were walking on the sidewalk
00:53:29 ►
and to
00:53:32 ►
I forget the protest
00:53:34 ►
we were going to, but
00:53:35 ►
we were
00:53:38 ►
walking along the sidewalk
00:53:40 ►
and there was a red light
00:53:42 ►
and I called out
00:53:44 ►
hold off to the people behind me, there was a red light, and I called out,
00:53:45 ►
hold off.
00:53:46 ►
To the people behind me, there’s a red light.
00:53:49 ►
And a cop arrested me.
00:53:51 ►
He’s saying that I was disturbing the public or something.
00:53:56 ►
But it was very cold.
00:53:57 ►
This was December, and he just wanted to get out of it. And so we were in
00:54:08 ►
And they
00:54:11 ►
We were in prison overnight and we had a
00:54:18 ►
It was Bill Bill staff, you know, yeah Bill shaft was a name of a
00:54:36 ►
Bill Schaaf. Yeah, Bill Schaaf was the name of a lawyer and he came and he was defending us. And the judge was saying he didn’t, you know, he understood when the lawyer explained
00:54:46 ►
what had happened.
00:54:47 ►
And so he just decided to let us go.
00:54:51 ►
And I said, he said, but don’t tempt fate the next time.
00:55:02 ►
And I said to the lawyer I said well is the First Amendment a not a
00:55:09 ►
now is that faith that or it was the First Amendment it’s freedom of assembly
00:55:17 ►
and the lawyer jammie with the elbow and said, come on.
00:55:26 ►
This is my first case.
00:55:33 ►
And then I was just a brat.
00:55:44 ►
Each of us would have a picture taken of us, of every individual with a cop that arrested them.
00:55:48 ►
And so I just said to the cop,
00:55:49 ►
as our picture was being taken,
00:55:51 ►
said, now are we going to go to the prom?
00:55:54 ►
And I just couldn’t resist it.
00:55:58 ►
So it was just… I followed those impulses
00:56:01 ►
and it got me into a lot of trouble sometimes.
00:56:06 ►
Any more?
00:56:08 ►
Anybody? Yes.
00:56:09 ►
I remember you were pretty good friends with Peter Bergman.
00:56:14 ►
Peter Bergman, yeah.
00:56:15 ►
Peter Bergman was not the actor Peter Bergman,
00:56:18 ►
but he was the first one in a group called the San Francisco Diggers.
00:56:27 ►
And the first time I heard the word ecology was from him.
00:56:34 ►
I looked it up, but I didn’t.
00:56:36 ►
But he was ahead of himself.
00:56:37 ►
He died recently, but he had a book about… I’m trying to remember what the name of it was, but it was about the boundaries of different countries.
00:56:57 ►
You know, like as if there’s acid rain that falls in Canada.
00:57:03 ►
Does that mean it’s not going to happen to you in the
00:57:05 ►
northern US? And so it was brilliant. This was in New York and he left to San
00:57:14 ►
Francisco with my girlfriend but I just remembered ecology. Okay, well, I appreciate
00:57:25 ►
your being an audience
00:57:28 ►
and laughing
00:57:30 ►
because that’s my job.
00:57:33 ►
Thank you.
00:57:39 ►
And just to be sure
00:57:40 ►
that you don’t miss this story
00:57:42 ►
about a classic work of art,
00:57:44 ►
here’s this.
00:57:46 ►
Speaking of my website, which is paulprassner.com with two S’s,
00:57:51 ►
they can see the look at the classic Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster,
00:57:57 ►
which a few years ago I had a former employee of Disney digitally color it in the authentic Disney colors.
00:58:08 ►
And this was first published in 1967 in black and white, first in my magazine and then as
00:58:13 ►
a poster.
00:58:15 ►
And Disney didn’t sue all this, though they discussed it because they thought it would
00:58:22 ►
get no further than that. But suddenly the image of, because Walt Disney was dead,
00:58:29 ►
and now all his imaginary characters were in a state of suspended animation in mourning for him.
00:58:37 ►
And so I just assigned Mad Magazine artist Wally Wood to draw a good old-fashioned Roman orgy.
00:58:48 ►
You know, they’re going on a binge because they had been repressed all these years by Disney.
00:58:54 ►
So anyway, they can check on my website and see how it is in color.
00:59:01 ►
And if you go to today’s program notes at psychedelicsalon.com, you can see the
00:59:06 ►
colorized version of this classic poster. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
00:59:12 ►
cyberdelic space. Namaste, my friends. Thank you.