The Life and times of an old hippie and his chums (part two)
extracted from Mad Aece
The fashion was psychedelic: bright colours and flowing designs in imitation of effects of the psychotropic drugs promoted by the emerging underground movement. Fashion students like Chrissie and art students like Aece, never waited to don the garb. Beats ‘turned on’ and became Hippies, so did many people from more ‘straight’ backgrounds. Chrissie lived at home with her parents and an elder sister, with whom she only shared frequent fights — on the receiving end. Her father was in the police and, although she longed to leave home, this was not agreeable to the parents, who wouldn’t allow her to live with someone without being married. So, for a couple of years, she and Aece kept up their courtship from separate addresses.
Aece still had a fair amount of freedom under this set up and was able to disappear off to London at odd times. Most noticeable amongst these excursions was to Alexander Palace to the ‘14 Hour Technicolor Dream’. Aece had never seen anything like it: oil and water-bubble light shows, beads, bells, caftans and music by Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, the Deviants, Sam Gopal and a host of other acts that had all emerged from the UFO Club, held at the Blarney Club, near the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. The music was unlike anything Aece had heard, with electronic music and Indian rhythms as two main influences, Syd Barrett was still with the Floyd and Daevid Allen with the Soft Machine. Aece was slow to figure out why Allen stared hypnotically into space, while he chanted poetry over the music made by the rest of the ‘Softs’ or why people danced around the perimeter all night long. He hadn’t ‘tripped out’ himself yet. The place also smelt different because people burned incense to disguise their cannabis smoking.
Aece had gone with Dodger, and an old Mod friend, Ziggy. It was their first all-nighter. The News of the World said it was “like the Last Rites of a Dying Tribe”. Nothing could have been further from the truth! John Lennon was there - Yoko Ono too — long before they teamed up, doing a pseudo-Dadaist Happening. Aece got talking to Denny Laine, who had just left the Moody Blues, and was about to form the Electric String Band, a much underrated band. The irony for Denny was that his big break was with Paul McCartney’s Wings, something less of a group than the other two. Fame didn’t seem an issue as stars and fans ambled around together. The literature and posters of the Alternative Society were all available and Dodger and Aece returned home with their first copies of International Times, and Oz as well as other memorabilia. This was the first of many jaunts into psychedelic nightlife. Chrissie’s parents came around to agreeing to let her stop at Aece’s mum's place in Chelmsford and as she didn’t know what planet she was on most of the time, this was a passport to going anywhere, anyhow they chose. They chose the UFO club, the Electric Garden in Covent Garden, one-off Love-Ins and Be-Ins like those at Alley Palley again and Christmas on Earth at Olympia, with groups like Eric Burdon’s New Animals, Tomorrow, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Outdoor gigs started to play an important part of the scene — the Hyde Park Free Concerts and Jefferson Airplane in Parliament Hill Fields for free, most noticeably. But the Windsor-cum-Reading Jazz and Blues Festival went psychedelic too and places like Plumpton Race Course and Spalding Flower Festival realised that there was money to be made out of all this. Jazzed-up Donovan and the Incredible String Band became favourite acts. Hendrix and the Floyd were such common acts to find on the bill at such gigs that they were no longer sought after but rather taken for granted.
On the way home from the UFO Club, the night that Procol Harum played, Dodger and Aece spotted a tall, unusual looking guy on the tube who had been at the club, with, not only hair half way down his back and a beard to match, but tinted wire-trimmed glasses that really only left his nose and a small piece of forehead and cheek as visible flesh. Fate would have it that this John, from Cambridge, would have a girlfriend called Lee, who was a drama student, and pally with Aece’s art school chums. Aece wound up doing art work for a production they put on at Cambridge Corn Exchange and then met up with them a couple of years later in an occult book shop they ran in Jesus Terrace, Cambridge. After that they lost contact as John became even more remote and moved, with Lee, into a cottage in a wood. Pluto must have been rising at the time of his nativity. It took over 20 years before they met again, at a funeral, and Aece got to see John’s eyes for the first time, “and very kind eyes they are, too!” said Lee. She was right. He had no need to hide them or be so remote. During the psychedelic era, he had been pally with all the Arts Lab. and UFO people.
The local scenes in Chelmsford were expanding too. Arthur, Gog, Don, Little John (a midget), Pete the Pole, Nik and the Peanut Girls, Sue and Wendy joined the throng. Fahim and Sulim were two Indian brothers whose parents were rich enough to give them a house to live in while they attended college. The house was affectionately known as ‘Patch’ after part of the road it stood in. It was the scene of at least one notable party in the psychedelic era when Aece lost his virginity. Chrissie had already lost hers a few boyfriends beforehand. Chris from Ingatestone and his closest friends used it as their first chance to try out LSD. Chris always claimed that someone fell out of a tree which he was peeing against and grabbed his todger to break their fall. If this was in the realm of hallucination or used by Chris to explain an enlarged member has never been established. In years to come, Chris and Aece were to suggest to Fahim that a blue ceramic plaque should be affixed to the outside of ‘Patch’ to commemorate its part in shaping the minds of a generation.
At the Colchester end of things, there was also a fine old ding-dong in Rowhedge, with the police turning up two or three times to deal with the hordes of Beaty-Hippy-Studenty types, and even, dropped-out squaddies from the barracks, that were spilling out onto the street while music blared into the night. Two vicar’s daughters were at the art school but, boy had they reacted against their upbringing. One of these was holding court in one of the bedrooms at the party. There was a queue all down the stairs, in which Boyd was amongst those queuing. Aece and Chrissie asked what the queue was for, and the answer came back “Hazel!”
Sometime during this blur of phantasmagoria, the law changed about the age of majority from 21 to 18, which sent down the privileges that become attendant on being adult. The age when you could marry without parental consent was set at 16. Chrissie was still determined to get away from her sister and the constraints of the parental home and Aece was equally determined to help her. The “too young to marry” advice was hurled at them but they went ahead anyway. The result made the front page of the Essex Weekly News and page 3 of the Essex Chronicle, as all the long hairs from Colchester and Chelmsford joined the relatives at Chelmsford Registry Office for a ‘Hairy Flowery Wedding’ and ‘Picture of Hippiness’ as the papers put it. Office workers from County Hall hung out of the windows, to shout their support. Everyone piled back to Aece’s mum’s house for a bizarre reception, with relatives in the front room and hippies ‘tripping’ in the back room. Considering Chrissie’s dad was a policeman, the event was pretty astounding. After the relatives had gone, the party continued at the ‘Lion and Lamb’ which had by now taken over from the Saracen’s Head as the place for long hairs and their ladies to hang out. It had a circular bar which put the clientele in mind of a circus and so it was popularly known as ‘the Animals’. A mighty heaving throng was there that night.
It was to Aece’s mother's house that the couple returned to that night, for that was to be their home for the immediate future. They had both dropped out of college and found themselves working in a Wimpy Bar to make ends meet. Chrissie had suggested that they become vegetarian as she couldn’t face the thought of preparing dead flesh to eat. Aece readily agreed. But it was ironic that they would have to rely upon a Meat Head’s parlour to pay their bills. The management were unbelievably creepy and pompous people, but the other waiters and cooks were Turkish so they welcomed the chance to have a smoke in the toilets before the manageress came down in the morning. When she did, all the staff were stoned off their faces! Aece operated the washing machine in the kitchen and prepared the salad and chips as well. Chrissie worked as a waitress and all the hippies came in during the day and made it a jolly little social scene.
Unbeknown to the Chelmsford contingent, Ken Kesey had transformed the U.S. by running the Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests around California and Oregon with the aid of the Grateful Dead and other emerging underground rock groups, as well as Neil Cassady, who spanned the Beat/Hippie generation gap. He had also taken off on his tripping travels with his group the ‘Merry Pranksters’ and terrorised the straight community with many wacky arty antics, in the faithful bus ‘Further’. These travels found their parallel for the Chelmsfordians in ‘Gog’s Van’. Gog, Johnny, Pete the Pole, Chrissie and Aece set off, in advance of the New Age Travellers that subsequent decades would create, in a heady and hedonistic quest for the remains of Arthurian legend in the West Country.
The van was a favourite target for the police to pull over on late night trips back from London to collect substances necessary to hippie euphoria. When tax discs had run out, country routes had to provide detours to ensure Gog’s continued liberty.
The idea of living with Aece’s mum, apart from the money angle, was to keep an eye on her state of health. The trouble was that this backfired and her mental health and the general squalor she liked to live in, and which she didn’t want interfered with, only lead to strife. So after one attempt to move into a flat in Chelmsford, which failed because the old lady followed them there and wouldn’t leave them alone, they gladly chucked in the Wimpy jobs and moved out to Aece’s dad’s caravan, which had been moved by then, to Highwood –— about six miles from Chelmsford. Aece’s dad was back in Barnet, retired, and staying with an old friend.
Back in the days at the Saracen’s Head, Ziggy had recognised a lean and lanky fella who had been at a Ray Charles concert that he and Aece had taken a couple of girls to. He was easily recognisable by the Bob Dylan cum Jimi Hendrix haircut that came to be known as the ‘Afro’ Sam definitely looked like a hippie whereas his friends Jeff, Mike and Bill still dressed like Mods. They all came from Maldon and Sam’s parents owned a big farm down there.
Given the moneyed background, Sam was able to travel the world with ease — usually in the winter when there was little work on the farm. If he got in to trouble he would just wire home and get money sent out. With the general interest in the culture of India at the time, it was inevitable that this would become a regular destination for Sam’s travels.
Aece had studied oriental religions ever since school days when Buddhism made more sense to him than the sin and suffering songs of Christianity. The Beat Zen ideas of Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, had developed this interest. Sam’s traveller's tales helped to put the Buddha in the context of Hinduism and Tibetan dialects of its spread en route to China. Aece also discovered there was a Western equivalent of some of the Tantrik cults of India in the form of Witchcraft and Ceremonial Magick. In India, Sam had met a couple of ex-patriots who promoted these connections: John Spiers, a Scot, had settled in Kaggalipura in Southern India, in an Ashram, or spiritual school, dedicated to the late Narayana Guru. He produced a magazine called Values, which included articles by the second ex-pat, known by a variety of titles, Sri Dadaji Gurudev Mahendranath. Dadaji had been initiated into witchcraft at a young age by his aunt, the Witch of Rottingdean, Clay Palmer, who had been a fortune teller for Queen Victoria. Later, Dadaji had got to know Aleister Crowley, who had advised him that, if he had his life to live over again, he would live in the Orient, and after Crowley's death, Dadaji had taken that direction, landing first in India and being met at the quay by an initiate of the Nath Lineage of Yogis. He further travelled in the Orient and became a Taoist priest, Soto Zen Master, Red Hat Lama and Tantrik.
Aece became a subscriber to Values and struck up a correspondence with John and Dadaji that was to last a couple of decades. John was to act as Aece’s Guru, or spiritual teacher, and taught him, apart from general philosophy with a pagan slant, the serious side of Astrology
Sam was a regular visitor at Chrissie and Aece’s homes and they were regular visitors to the farm. Sam had adopted an Indian artist, Vasant, into the farm where he occupied one of the old tied cottages and supplemented his income from painting, with work on the farm. This gave Aece another Art and Indian connection. There was a big exhibition of Tantrik Art at the Hayward Gallery and this was a big influence on Aece too. Through Sam, Aece also met Nik Douglas, who had just made a film about Tantrism and many of the stills of the scenes from India filled his first book on Tantra Yoga. Other members of Nik’s family made a business out of Tantrik Art reproductions and badges, under the name of Tantra designs. This still flourishes.
Out at the caravan, Aece was working on intricate psychedelic ink drawings and thought it would be a good idea to hawk his portfolio around London, to see if he could get a job out of it. Sam had a Canadian friend from his travels, who was working in a London studio and, after an unsuccessful visit to the offices of International Times where everyone worked for a cause rather than money, they visited the studio. When Sam’s friend, Susan, saw Aece’s work, she suggested they try Gandalf’s Garden, the Mystical Scene Magazine, run by Muz Murray, then from Centre House in Kensington. Muz liked the artwork and used it in subsequent issues of the magazine but it didn’t yield any money, which had, instead, to come from the DHSS.
The Gandalf’s Garden scene soon started to expand and a shop opened in Kings Road, Chelsea at the World’s End opposite ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ Boutique — with half a Yankee car between the Shopfront and pavement end, selling arts, crafts and mystical paraphernalia. Chrissie and Aece moved up to London and worked in the Shoppe or on the layout of the magazine. They stayed, first of all, in a flat in Notting Hill, which proved overcrowded, and then in the cellar of the Shoppe with the mice. The cellar was used for regular Friday evening ‘moots’ which were usually lead by visiting Indian Yogis or characters of similar interest. The meditations were so peaceful that Aece once opened his eyes to see a little mouse move between the cross-legged meditators and sit on hind legs to listen to the chanting. Sid Rawle turned up one night with Swami Vishnu Devananda, who was to be the spiritual mentor to a community to be set up on an island off the Irish coast, donated by John Lennon. It didn’t last. The time was rife with idealistic Utopian dreams. Devananda was the world’s clumsiest Yogi, that night, knocking over candles and all sorts, yet he could sing a great many chapters of the Bhagavad Gita from memory.
Some of the slushy sentiment that accompanied the ‘love and peace’ ideals of the time, required no parody when TV’s ‘Young Ones’ brought out Neil'’s Book of the Dead: a pisstake of the hippie era. ‘Leaf Talk’, an article that Aece and Chrissie had posed for, was quoted verbatim, and proved sufficiently naff to need no paraphrase!
60s Aece artwork
Page(s) 42-47
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