Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern, CANDY (1968)

Life is a latticework of coincidence, whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to --we're worried we'd go crazy if we did  -- and we would, if the stayed down too long. With our blinders up, thankfully, the coincidence matrix scans less as a pineal gland-buzzing 9-dimensional grid of raw wave energy and more as an abstract field of meaningless white noise with the odd splotch of identifiable pattern-- a ghost outline of an unintelligible word that comes and goes long before any deciphering of the cosmic hidden message can ensue. But dig this, man: when you're alight with manic magic or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic or a genius, then every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand coincidence matrix four-dimensional linkages, stretching from your mind into the TV screen and out to America and into your own cellular biology, everything macro- and micro- fractal-ing out and in, through the past and future, and in higher dimensions than we can consciously perceive, except through the metatextual incorporation of media (i.e. virtually).

Whether or not we can handle it, this interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendril lattice matrix betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind. It's all connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the mind and the DVD spins as if a windmill testament to our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality is an interconnected 'other' staring back at "us" as blankly as we stare at TV commercials, perking up only when we're going through emotional extremes. This 'other' groans in boredom if we don't keep it entertained, as much as vice versa. If we behold its gaze directly we're either dead or insane, but art, baby....art... Art gives us the Perseus Medusa mirror shield by which to cautiously glimpse that which we cannot behold head-on, that which the blinders are there to block. In other words, we can keep our blinders on but widen our perception at the same time.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron around the pineal car wreck (presuming fluoridation hasn't encrusted it), one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, the Lenny Bruce of lauded literary lustful libertinism, the acidhead Brecht, the Ayatollah of cock rock lit. Southern took the ball from randy sordid authors like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' fire hoop, shattering the speed of the three martini lunch's glass bottom end zone and through the Hindu deity receiver's fifth and sixth arms, scoring the free-love mind game psychedelic put-on touchdown. True anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove mix jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy, trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants, un-PC skirt chasing, grim apocalypse flashing and vintage slapstick in ways that make the puerile inanity of today's sex comedy seem tragically flaccid.   
Maybe you don't, but I remember the year (circa 1995?) that that girls' dating guide book The Rules reaffixed a heavy price tag to free love. It killed it, in fact. It had just begun to fly (in the 70s) and already it was being called back to the nest for overhauls, when it returned it was all date-rapey, the masses never getting the correlation between the popularity of Game of Thrones and the news' latest sex abuse charge. On a side latticework spider strand: let yourself wonder much sex would be in books if not for the juicy free press provided by censorship, probably not as much. Dirty books once were banned in many countries (including ours), and were therefore exceedingly popular. Authors like Burroughs, Southern, and Nabokov could make fast money churning them out for Parisian small presses, which were then smuggled into America as 'imported' erotica (what they were really importing, was literature. (The only way to get America to read 'the articles' was by printing them in Playboy).

Lax censorship in our current age on the other hand has strangely led to a second Puritanism, reminding one of the clean-cut Nazis rising up from the ancient Rome-style decadence of Weimar Germany. Southern is from an era when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed nerdy immature boys or rapey HBO writers. Literary lions have no place on our bookshelves now, except in the library , where erotica isn't always welcome. And more and more, old dead straight dirty white guys are being scissored from college reading lists to make room for minority and female voices. As a result, erotica now seems the result only of immaturity and a small vocabulary, a sad association from which it may never recover.

This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of sex may seem a victory to the easily deluded PC snobs of the Ivory Tower, but they've never been good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineal glands being so fluoride-encrusted they're blind to even the idea of blindness. They've forgotten that when intellectual satire is volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror, it destroys only the dead cells within, leaving the rest vibrant and now hip enough to incorporate critique. Only the mundane and banal need fear (and even then, the teacher's union springs to protect their right to keep boring students). Meanwhile the potty-mouthed prattle of today's grown infants is never a threat to the higher-ed gestapo and can indeed be yoked to the PC mafia's repressive practices, encouraging said banal literati that not one dead cell shall slough off from the obese corpse of "literature."

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the heterosexual Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertro-chemical industrial complex, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the American Medical Association, even the counterculture of which he was an active part. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id, run aground in Paris after the War like the Lost Generation before him. First he attended the Sorbonne on the GI Bill, then became a Paris Review co-founder, then a dirty book writer full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics, then a black comic screenwriter. Willing to look deep into the obscene eye of humanity without blinking, or even judging, his adults-only humor wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices, at least one STD to their credit, maybe a few scars from the war. Theirs was a level of maturity we seldom see today (think Johnny Carson's smooth elan vs. Jimmy Fallon's beer-bloated fanboy gushing or even Animal House vs. Old School -- and weep for an America that will one day make Adam Sandler seem a stalwart fount of manly gravitas).

If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after this latest PC putsch, one yet able to be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny, that author is well-hidden, and would never dare come forward until said putsch hath passed (I predict it will by 2020). One day he (or she --why the hell not?) may write a book that could bring us out of this maturity death spiral, or that could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their knowledge, borderline/date rape, etc., (seems is the key word in that sentence). In the meantime, men now feel so bad for saying no to a relationship after saying yes to sex that we'd just as soon pre-empt the whole thing.

(Sorry, another latticework side strand): I mean how else are you going to know, for sure, you don't want to go out with a girl, unless you sleep with her first? But that's 'wrong' now. Not back then, apparently! Back then no one was meant to feel bad at all; even a man chasing a girl young enough to be his daughter around the room, his tongue hanging out, honking like Harpo Marx, was under no unseen liberal arts lash of penitence. It may have been annoying for the girl, or not, who knows. But either way, there was no lashing going on, no souring of the air to lead to repression, which seems to me the main underwriter of misogyny and vileness.

If you neuter your satiric watchdog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, thus making his entire existence superfluous. And those burglars he lets in are actually squatters who-- once ensconced within your walls--will linger until they've worn your masculinity down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub. All you will have left are James Bond marathons and then only when your wife is away at spin class. When you hear her car pulling into the garage you quick change the channel to PBS, and bury your nose innocently in The New Yorker. And then, only then, will said squatters leave you to your misery.

You know what I'm trying to say: the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smugly behind walls of standards and practice policies, while once-proud writers are assigned stories of mundane consensual love affairs between rational adult celebrities who just happen to be married (albeit to other people). All bawdiness is now relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmented SOV puerility on late night cable, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour risks having their texts read aloud on CNN or sent around to all her friends by morning, by that afternoon they're out of a job, hounded from the human race. By dinner, forgotten.

And yet, do we think we can shame human nature? No matter how much PC lip service they pay, chicks still pick the brutish lothario over the sensitive poet, most of the time. What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid? It took me 20 years to figure out (with the help of Camille Paglia), what Terry Southern knew all the time: intellectual writers could be just as wild, chest-thumping, and aggressively sexual as any jock, greaser, thug, or motorcyclist. We didn't need to associate the masculine literary intellect with pussywhipped PC enfeeblement, is my point. I despise what's passing for a 'men's movement' these days, and their vile misogynistic corners of the web, but that world has nothing to do with Southern's, any more than a rabid Chihuahua to do with an Alaskan wolf pack.

The vanishing of Southern's pack, then, is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore, or if they have them they must either hide that fact lest it compromise their nebbish image, or boast like douche bags, and lose our respect that way. Most comic talents lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Reduced to the status of a shiftless older sibling in the home by their ballbusting mom and her incestuous darling son, dads turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up, it's presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People).

In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied, balding, too drunk to even make it to the party plane but they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm. and they feel no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic. Smart is sexy over there. Or was last I checked. Or so I hear.

Southern centered

Southern's oeuvre now represents an era where it may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, no one would be 'slut-shamed', and that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone instantly from birdless to beflocked with a single hit record. Maybe he noted the accompanying changes in their sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof, and that's what shows up in Candy and Barbarella. This is because the safety of loserdom allows for Lacanian objet petit a self-construction, i.e. it's easy to be a stud when you're not actually getting any offers. Once the girl makes it plain she's up for a roll in the way, once the free room and bed are located, and once pants come off--then all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest... Cialis for daily use is still decades away, erection-deflating coke dust in the party plane air ducts, and groupies impatiently waiting, their plaster cast a-drying more with every flaccid minute.... It's no wonder men have to boast later to their bros --getting the entire deed right, from first eye contact to putting clothes back on and sneaking back downstairs, to satisfy her needs as well as your own without fumbling the condom, losing the erection, and making it all seem organic --it's no easy task. It's a triumph, and there should be more than one other person to bear witness!

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for my discussion of Candy (1968) because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their characters' over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in this film, in ways that would be too unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. He takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and the naked body with all its hairs and gasses, as incorruptible and forgiven all trespass. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically unaffected postures before lunging at a passing hottie naif, and the way all their strutting oratory just make them all the more ridiculous once their trousers are halfway off, for no amount of bluster and male pride can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at today's conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, liberal PC lockstep on the other, and the Joy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety. Dr. Ruth is still out there somewhere, but her voice has grown so faint...

And as far as movies are concerned, the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out. One false step and you wind up being demonized in a Lifetime movie.

Though only based on Southern's original novel (co-written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems quintessentially Southern at first, standing alongside Dr. Strangelove as a savagely honest critique of America's noisemaker patriotism as well as its drug-fueled paranoia and the sexual puritanism that keeps each at odds.

Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly grand, spectacularly pathetic, and thoroughly hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making his first appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly attended by Candy (Ewa Aulin), setting the mechanisms in motion. Brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after reading his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo... after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been "banned or burned in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius grandeur to hangdog contrition as he mentions his book is available... signed by the author... for three dollars... in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the mailing address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey."

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy: "Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero: "Well man, that's the story of love."

Moments later MacPhisto has Candy in the back of his Benz (indeed there's the idea he came there expressly to pick out a nubile co-ed) while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and like to get into sexual adventures together, ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," McPhisto says as prelim to his attack. "It has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." A Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz gets turned on by accident, and McPhisto winds up crawling around at Candy's feet, booming on about his 'giant, throbbing need' and pathetically lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids, all while reciting random verses and sobbing heroically.

Then, alas, with a terrible Mexican accent, Ringo Starr joins the fray. Playing the 'innocent' virgin gardner, he hears the noise and comes down and starts molesting Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar while dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!"), beaming so approvingly at the crazy scene methinks I was in the kind of hetero-camp heaven I once believed the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the best part of the entire film and even that is marred in the second part by Ringo's terrible performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, who comes home later, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father, also Astin). Uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches" but a drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / Valkyrie / flying nun effect.

Alas, the film has already fallen into it's start/stop rhythm. Once the whips and brass knuckles come out, the film starts to just hang there. Director Marquand and screenwriter Buck Henry don't know what to do with the scene, how to resolve it or make it measure up to that awesome chase. The family winds up running onto the tarmac and hopping onto a B-29 taking off with a crack paratrooper cargo, always airborne in case of nuclear attack.

Then, determined to seem more miscast than Ringo, comes Walter Matthau as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jewish-intellectual US Army general?) And another thing -since when would a general waste his rank in control of only a single planeload of shock troops? A non-com could handle that duty easy- it's what they're there for.

Still, ever a pro, Matthau knows how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, but his cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending it to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Buck Turgidson or Sterling Hayden to Ripper: it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid.

But Candy's next fornicating adventure is one of the greats, involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!").

Coburn's histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Dr. Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend of Southern's and Coburn has the spirit of the thing, modulating Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum. Aside from Burton, he's the only other star in the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in even the most seemingly mundane lines (which Matthau breezes right over, missing all the half-notes) and to let each word ring like freedom's infernal bell. Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms, Coburn conjures a physician as a liberated but insane as any before or since, accusing the operating theater audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his finger right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing"), saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph...

My friends, there is no other word for it: Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!

And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg (alas, dubbed, as she was in Barbarella) appears as Krankheit's number one nurse. Then, kind of worse: Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator. Then, better: John Huston shows up as a prurient administrator who seems to get off trying to shame Candy in front of the entire post-op party after she's caught being molested by her uncle. But hey! Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots at the party, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage by powering a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. how dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? Sir... Sir?

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg 

From then on, alas, the film's mostly downhill: a scene with a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy Italian stereotype-a filmmaker is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment and earthy hostility as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress (alas, who can?). Southern's/Henry's dialogue stays interesting but the targets are too easily skewered and not every actor knows where the cherries are in their monologues. Why not have the cops be groovy, just to be weird, man? But it being 1968, I guess cop-bashing was still 'in'. Now, though, the blue collar drooling thug cop angle comes off almost more like class-based snobbery than cutting satire.

Another low point: Candy joins up with a criminal mastermind hunchback (Charles Aznavour), who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni x Feldman-style behavior eats up another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off (if you've seen Godfather 2 - which admittedly came after). And seeing this humpbacked little pisher rutting away atop the luscious Candy is like watching a cockroach dying of Raid atop a vanilla cupcake; with all his hippie minions showering them with down feathers from busted pillows from above, it's also very gang-rapey and uncool.

Escaping once again, Candy winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl --played by Marlon Brando. Half-baked and not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn--his voice stuck in a congested limbo between Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson and Abie the Fish Peddler from Animal Crackers, Brando's Indian accent ends up just sounding congestedly Borscht Belt, mining the rhythm of Lenny Bruce as Groucho or Alan Arkin as played by Sky Masterson. Brando's way too internalized and self-righteous for this Grindl to reach the compromised grandeur of Burton's McPhisto or confident carnivorous genius of Coburn's Krankheit (better Brando himself be satirized by some other actor). When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" while eating a sausage he sounds just like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move not to share the food that it's hard to feel anything but a sympathy headache with the by then-starving and much-abused naked girl, and since by then the movie's cresting the two hour mark, with plenty more vignettes to go, you almost certainly will be ready to just smack someone, hit stop and go have dinner or a nap.

Shocking and racist as it might be for an actor of Brando's caliber and political leanings to appear in brownface while noshing on a sausage (which no guru would ever eat) and floating phony guru raps to some blonde in the trailer equivalent of a shag carpeted party van, just remember he (and Burton) liked working in European adult films at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972, both X-rated), respectively. Abroad they could be free to drink, eat, smoke and screw to excess without having to hide it all lest America's post-Puritan pressure cooker explode all over them. The wine was better, the vibe looser. Who wouldn't rather be there than unbearable gossipy Hollywood?

Which brings me to my final lattice strand--the idea central to Candy's Christian values--which begins with what MacPhisto says in the beginning about being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed at the time, but if they didn't try, where would humanity be?  And as Lenny Bruce would say, that's the true difference between obscenity and humanity. The truth of our 'huge, throbbing need' is unendurable any other way except as a joke that paradoxically lets us save face and free ourselves of it at the same time. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body's societal failings, the hairy gorilla remnant that can't be hidden underneath the seersucker suit. We need society's forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if we denude the beast of his business suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all we do is bum everyone out. We become just another nag, part of the problem. It's just sex, after all. In Europe it's just part of life. Only here does the Puritan shaming venom still drizzle.

In insisting on the okayness of these obscene trespasses, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, that there's nothing bad about the human biological system with all its warty needs. Let it be satirized but never condemned. Let only hypocrisy be attacked without mercy.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about your petty morals." - KR, in deposition

To sum up: Candy comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid secondhand smoke or arguing in a mawkish voice against plastic bags at the food co-op. They were men, my liege! Southern's era had more repression and obscenity laws to reckon with, but they had the artistic clout to bash into them with dicks swinging, brain hanging, and fists helicoptering. If Southern and friends had been at that food-co-op meeting they would be hurling the organic produce at that anemic hipster, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented. Back in their own time all they could do instead was rage against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then die for real, as nature intended, either in WW2 or Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf from which no faded reprobate returns. Rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians, bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month (the impatient specter waiting in the reception area, rereading that old Us Weekly for the eleven hundredth time while doctors stall out the clock since they're getting richer by the hour), rather than that, sir, they died... like men!

Real hipsters of the older era--having faced death abroad or within, heroically dodged the draft or fought the war, leapt into the waiting arms of the angry fuzz, or served jail time for a single joint--earned their aliveness and their secret stash of war-issued amphetamine tablets (and any spare Pervatin liberated from dead German's survival kits); they were able to dig on and understand modern jazz, and to smoke anywhere, including the doctor's office. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, Moroccan hashish, burgundy and deep connections to literature when the canon was smaller and more homogenous; if they pilgrimaged south, to the Amazon, they partook of the holy yage or the magic mushroom. Today we're lucky if we can afford a single Sex on the Beach and there's no smoking, sir... sir.... no smoking (and in NYC no dancing either).

I'm not arguing against women's rights, or equality, or clean air, or any of the huge strides we've taken, just wondering if perhaps in revisiting Candy, we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls and rediscover how well-read (SWM) intellectual weight might once again benefit from rabid id-driven boosters in trying to make it through the zipper of hypocrisy and into the erect stratosphere. Southern was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he co-invented) all the way down to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors, because America still knew that facing its own monstrous extinction with a joke rather than duck-and-cover rhetoric was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap and--rather than running home to your wife or war in terror--plunging headlong into the moment, is heroic. It was a time when being able to accept and engage in casual sex with a random girl on your commuter train was brave and manly, and not callow, vile, and somehow predatory, while brandishing your wedding ring like a cross in a vampy graveyard, and racing out at the next stop to wait for the next train, was to be a pussy. Gentlemen, times have changed, mostly for the best, but we should still always be ready. Whatever may come, we cannot allow... a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Not good: Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One)

"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has gone into a deep WASP-y freeze these past decades, it's easy to forget his 60's pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking horny trickster behind his neurotic fussing: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS, LOVE AND DEATH and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL, has a bawdy good humor that hasn't been very 'good' since his whole 'outing' as a sexual predator. It's important we remember that his Humbert-nebbish self-conscious paralysis and priapic overeager clowning was part of the sexual revolution, long before they were 'art.' In the 70s, a nebbishy persona and thick glasses didn't specifically exclude him from the in-crowd, as a result, he's not as threatened by the tall-goy-and handsome competition in ways he would be later. Maybe that's why WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT holds up so well today. He's not competing against a beautiful tall god like Peter O'Toole --he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share of comedy to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, with Allen pulling in the sloppy thirds as a nebbishy strip club prop man. Add a bevy of hot, talented comediennes and the film rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it, preferring to hang out in raincoat drag clubs with Oktoberfest grotesques and under beds and down late night hotel hallways like a guilty sinner while Mancini slinks along beside him in barefoot haste.

By contrast, British directors like Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way when Allen is writing and comedic heavies are acting, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together in a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off and putting them back on before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, arm-in- arm, to lob rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her, her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers like a terrible Cyrano from the bushes. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" Drunken recitations from Hamlet are tossed up instead to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them, and O'Toole playing a drunk trying to do Hamlet is about the best Hamlet ever. Meanwhile Sellers' ridiculous black wig finally makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence (he apparently loved the wig so much he wore it all through the shoot). I love O'Toole more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in that Allen worked in the Borscht Belt gag room of Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel to YEAR, a relic from a smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex was relegated to the foul-mouths of 20 year-old virgins.

 MY FAVORITE YEAR doesn't hold up as well, today - at least for me. It has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and hack zaniness (Stealing a police horse and riding around Central Park at dawn? It's right up there with PETULIA's tuba). But Allen actually wrote for Sid Ceasar in TV's early 'years' but in 1965 is not yet all hung up on ethnic RADIO DAYS-style nostalgia. Instead of those G-rated tropes, PUSSYCAT has an air of real madness. There is need here for horse theft or other generic bits of naughtiness, and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man in the prime of beauty and charm, who's been laughing a lot in between takes and makes the most of every clever line and every pretty girls thrown within his woo-pitching radius. He pours on a kind of dissolute actorly resonance most dramatic stars playing comedy wouldn't bother with. When, for example, he brings a cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting it feels like he's sharing something meaningful to him, O'Toole, with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all through the shoot. It's beautiful. It's what that lame tuba, or that lame police horse, was probably fumbling after.

Playing a charmer who is as irresistible to women as they are to him, we feel in O'Toole's depth that his life has been one long series of one-night stands, and when he says he needs more out of life. O'Toole is more than good, he's convincing. So when one of his more insistent conquests, played by Romy Schneider, demands he marry her, he goes to see a psychiatrist. Enter: Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction (and we'd now be compelled to say "there's nothing funny about it!" in case anyone is listening). Meanwhile, Woody shows up through the stage woodwork and somehow winds up taking a disillusioned Romy home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.

PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle but had it turned out that way it would have been a completely different film and nowhere near as fun. Men like myself distrust Beatty-- his ability to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed does not move us. We love O'Toole on the other hand, because his pallor is that of a man taking too much Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seems so critical to Beatty's self-esteem that it's not joyous just compulsive. O'Toole just genuinely seems too enraptured by the beauty and sparkle in ways Beatty's too narcissistic to match. Each new lover takes just a bit of O'Toole's bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention, that each time he cheats is like the first. As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?

That's the joy of it all: we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton. As far as we knew, there could never be too much sex. Oh man, to have Cialis for daily use, but as yet no AIDS? Can you imagine?

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, here via an image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty a Catholic to really go for broke. That he'd run home at the last minute hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA, as many of us probably would. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they make peace and decide you're a sleaze for wanting them all, and suddenly no one wants you and then you're just tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or Donna Summer's cake in the rain.

Girls of O'Toole, from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts) has seldom been more alluring as the mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster en route to le Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping merry-go-round; Paula Prentiss is aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward presents her with a commemorative plaque); Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphonic repression and I love her to death, so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up? All but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975).
 

Look! Look at the lips of that Prentiss poet. 

But what's important is that Woody doesn't really believe either notion - monogamy or nymphomania - is the answer. Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen write large: the sex is easy and breezy, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual somehow scoring the love of a teenager or a prostitute in his future films. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permission to keep things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. His pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!

That's fine because, marriage-minded women or no, there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas. Even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it? And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're all having a blast, and why not?

So instead of getting upset, just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man one minute and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be The "Joy of Responsibility, Control and Prior Consent" - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down in every rom-com to turn off even a moralistic old studio like the post-code MGM.

But this is 1965, we don't have to worry about that yet. Here no woman runs away who doesn't secretly want to be chased, the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.

PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francois Hardy. All she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile" and we'd be at it again.

PPS - Rereading this in light of the Harvey Weinstein /Louie CK stuff kind of shocks me - my only excuse was a kind naïveté. Since that piece by Ronan Farrow and the one by his sister that came out in the wake of Blue Jasmine, I've been on an Allen embargo, and now the bawdy 'all women want to be chased' attitude in the film and in my piece unnerve me. I was protesting more the mawkish sentiment of rom-coms and this pro-family dynamic then in vougue. But I think this rousting of the predators from Hollywood is very very important, and good for male-female relations as a whole, as the sooner they're all identified and eliminated, the quicker we can go back to 'fun' in sex and male-female banter with a clearer understanding and less silence about real intentions and motives.  Meanwhile, of course Allen is still at it, with something called Wonder Wheel. Ugh -- Kate.... Kate, what are you thinking? (12-19-17)

Bouncer at the Gates of Love: REVOLUTION (1968)

"What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion." 

So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And O'Connell's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed... and in 1968 we were yet to take the first of our steps toward changing it back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race. Between 1966 and 1969, LSD was still semi-legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, turning an entire demographic from self-absorbed mopes into eastern spirituality-embracing free spirits (instead of vice versa). And not only the young people but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-based spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; group marriages and swinging were acceptable substitutions for the exclusivity of the two person pair bond; and LSD was everywhere, recommended in 4 out 5 clinical psychiatrist offices, doctoral psychology experiments, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' (from which "Purple Haze" gets its name) as free samples at Monterey Pop Festival alone. Tastemakers were jumping onboard right and left. One hit and your whole life opened up like a flower you never even knew had been closed. Films like Blow-Up, The Trip, Easy Rider, and The Endless Summer made a conventional three act narrative strictly for squares.

No matter what your age, it was pretty 'hip' in the upper and middle classes to at least have tried it, even if it was just so you had something to talk about during Friday night's bridge game. Having that 'experience' made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping (or cocaine) in the 1980s, or ecstasy in the 90s.

So along comes REVOLUTION, about which the always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, [filmmaker] O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete…  (cont.)

Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? With music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. Watching today, the crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade of panhandlers along the Haight.

Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. My Pupils are dilated in the mirror but reflecting someone 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who just stepped out her shell... a girl named... Today.

No, man, that's like her name. She changed her name to 'Today,' because that's all we have. That's everything there is. Dig? Can you imagine where that chick's head is at, man?

Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell's camera from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: There's Today, begging for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho. She climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth redwoods. There's squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's rose tint-free glasses you can see the auric waves as her whole body sighs in relief as five hundred years of socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and the kind of good set and setting the Haight in 1965-7 could provide.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued on some level that REVOLUTION was meant less to wake the people up from their westernized stupor and more to turn on the raincoat brigade, all those lusty adults curious about the supposedly limitless free love available if they ever went to San Francisco. Hence there's a lengthy naked dance troupe going nuts under liquid psychedelic lights to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below). But such a prurience is addressed in the film, too, as the Sexual Freedom League explains that only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't overrun the scene and turn it into the end of Requiem for a Dream or Viridiana).

In a way, it's sad the SFL had to do that, such rule-making is the first unraveling thread on total freedom's poncho. As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a keen hatred for male sexual aggression for just this reason. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like being an over-eating pig at a communal picnic and you didn't even bring anything--not even a jug of wine. But America's trained its men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! They orgied it up, but they were rich and attractive. No one wants to sleep with ugly raincoat pervs, so the problem just gets worse. Oh well, as long as they pay to see it, because bulbs for those light show projectors are frickin' expensive, take it from me

Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. By now I've done some of both. The counterculture died, or did it? I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, we blew it. But now of course I'm in AA with the chastened old men and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go. Frankly, I don't envy him. Sounds like an awful lot of bother.

To its immense credit, REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping. Interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the open-minded adult opinion, the front line reports from cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs, to counterbalance the starry-eyed unity proponents. Many of the adults think the  hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can, they say--power to the flower! Good luck to you all--but either get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so we can use them on the weekends with our kids, not so you unemployed system-bashing vagrants can use them as free showers while making us feel like the imposers. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's and the bad trip victim's punkass friends! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands. Soooo typical. Man when I was in that scene I was known as 'the doctor' for a reason, I could talk anyone off the ledge, a one-man chill-out tent, and it was to me door you'd go before considering a hospital.

Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."

He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine," as opposed to just escape reality. "It's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it didn't happen. I saw you there!

I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who may not have had such a 'trip,' for it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile even I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over without ever quite starting the journey. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and (alas) AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and then found what I was looking for in Effexor. But the revolution, as in a permanent change for the better, never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took, nor America. But we have the music, and a parameter of spiritual experience and knowledge we'd have missed otherwise (our western openness to yoga, Deepak Chopra, etc would never be where it is today without the LSD revolution) and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves.

Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.

That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the dirty old men out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a bouncer at the gates of dawn, what kind of utopia is that?

Now let me in, goddamn it!

++++++

PS - There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see what those hippies 'grew up' to be, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.



PPS: REVOLUTION is no longer avail. on Netflix Streaming and has never been available on DVD but I'm sure it's 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't yet been co-opted by the media to sell its fall line-up and dance-dance video games. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story

Hell's Angels Vs. The Flower Child Dead: GIMME SHELTER (1970)

In the wake of Woodstock it was apparent to even the hardliners in political office that "relating" to the youth movement had become intrinsic to long-term survival. Where the rock stars went, young potential voters followed in legions, a city's worth of population literally on the move. If they stopped getting high long enough to realize the power they had, these kids could overrun the capital without firing a single shot. In true American fashion, these youths were an organized political force and a swarm of ravenous locusts: eating, drinking, and smoking everything in sight and leaving only cigarette butts, empty beer cans, broken tents, and excremental mud in their wake. When the big rock acts came to town they were like a band of bespangled reverse pied pipers; it was up to the village elders to make sure they led all the rats to the swamps way outside of town, instead of letting them camp on Main Street.

Today we roll our eyes in outrage that FBI had files on rock stars like John Lennon but Altamont shows the feds weren't all wrong in seeing him and his peacenik ilk as a threat to national security. No one at the time could have known how ably pills, pot, and potent potables could derail a protest movement. If they had, the powers that be would have been.... dispensing it.... importing... it. Oh my god! Conspiracy! LSD, tool of the CIA in keeping the kid nation pinned to the couch. Hey, they were just saying give peace a chance (i.e., if peace knocked on the door, Lennon would hear it out, like the pitch of a nervous  vacuum salesman). The kids would try to stop the war with a clap their hands, or stage sit-ins, but there was a reason they were sitting --they couldn't stand up. Vertigo, man.

The kids, it turned out, were no threat, unless they didn't get their drugs, their music, and their isolated acres.

So, as the Stones hadn't been at Woodstock, and were naturally jealous of those who had, Mick and Keith decided to stage Woodstock West, so to speak, out in San Francisco. The politicians and state leaders didn't try to talk any sense into them, or shut them down, or run them out of town on a rail, but instead rushed to accommodate with starstruck obsequiousness, as captured in Maysles' stunning documentary film. Legal superstar Mel Belli acts as the Stones' obstacle-remover, making sure local land owners and city sealers don't stand in their way. When he tells the contrarian owner of Altamont Speedway on speaker phone that "the Stones will be there tomorrow morning," it's with granite certainty. A platoon of cops would be as outnumbered as a skeleton UN peacekeeper force in the middle of a full scale Rwandan genocide.

If you don't know what happened, man, if you haven't seen the doc, I can sum up that the Stones didn't want a bunch of cops on their stage bumming folks out and they didn't want the stage too high up, as that implied inaccessibility or something (there hadn't been many security guards at Woodstock, but the stage was built so high they didn't need them). The compromise: the Stones got the Hell's Angels to do security and as there was no room for the Angels to lean on their bikes and drink their beer between the crushing rush of fans and the stage, dozens of people got bopped a little bit upon their sconces with traditional Angels accoutrements like chains, pool cues, and in one case, a knife.


I've seen this film dozens of times since the mid-1980s, when my punk rocker friends and I would watch it every day after school, to my hippy years in college and after, so it's managed to transcend several Erich phases. I've had lots of time to study the footage and see what went wrong and my sense of blame has shifted 380 degrees over the decades. As a punk teenager I was all terrified of the Angels and what I thought was random violence. Now I see the film in the context of the plethora of zombie films choking horrordom, and I think Altamont would make a great addition to Romero's series: Hell's Angels vs. the Flower Child Dead. 

I'm sure that it's what it felt like to the Angels, who were misled into thinking it would be a cakewalk of getting loaded and just keeping peaceful loving flower children from tripping over the stage, and were thus unprepared for a job that entailed controlling a crowd of hundreds of thousands of bad acid-guzzling, late-to-the-lovefest poseurs, lightweights, stalkers, jonesers, wallies, murfs, amateurs, perverts, and raging dillweeds -- all suddenly remembering they know Mick Jagger personally and Mick invited them onstage and... oh wow, man this shit is kicking in and... it's all cool so let me just bite... a chunk... off the band's shoulder and climb into Charlie's bass drum and sleep the glowing paisley handcuffs off.

The Angels were outnumbered and high as kites. Who can blame them for going a little Street Fightin' Man on the glazed-eyed, needy throngs trying to climb over them, treating their beloved bikes like stepladders. Maybe those people were unable to not trip over the bikes from people behind them frantically pushing as they were getting pushed, or maybe they were just idiots with no respect. I can't imagine getting to the front of that mess without being either some kind of pushy asshole with no regard for others or camped out in advance for so long you were practically dead, so I'm on the fence.  The whole Manson thing had, by then, occurred, so we knew west coast hippies weren't all folkie peacenik like the east coast, yeah I said it!


I mention this not to belittle the tragic events, but to illuminate how powerful and well-done the film is that, for all the times I've seen it, I never remember much of anything consistent, like RASHOMON, the "what happened" that's captured on film changes with every viewing. Mick's attempt to stay cool and happy onstage during the decent into a new level of violence emblematic of the fall of the movement as a whole. He can't see or tell what's going on with the lights in his eyes, but he knows something bad is happening, and the confidence and sense of artistic freedom leaks so fast out of his voice you can hear the whole world's optimism going with it.

"People always seems to get in some kind of a scuffle every time we start to play that number," he says. His sexy rockstar cocksuredness becoming a "let's all remain calm, children" kind of principal at the school assembly. "People, Cool out! Sisters! Brothers and Sisters! We don't want to fight, do we?" But he asked another rhetorical question just a few scenes/nights earlier: "You don't want my trousers to fall off, do you?" And in both cases the answer is the same inchoate howl from the keyed-up mob.

Rock stars asking for restraint? Hilarious and chilling to a faux-jaded teenager for whom it's all just yesterday's papers. But as I age into it, becoming the Stones' age in the film while being in a band in and after college, then dealing with the aftermath, the years of anguished pining for the lost sense of cool camaraderie and the afterglow from dancing, drugs, and fulfilled desire, watching movies like SHELTER, HEAD, YELLOW SUBMARINE, and MONTEREY POP over and over, like a heartbroken old maid reading and rereading love letters from a long-gone beau, now, the hurt is gone, a kind of jaded caustic stealth optimism remains, and seeing the film now is to look at people younger than myself, kids, their pandemonium and moments of quiet beauty, terror and despair all too real and too true to be merely glorified, worshipped, missed or condemned.

In the end, for all their peacenik lip service, GIMME SHELTER is the Stones as Circe's sirens bidding through their beguiling song the hippies swim through the crowd sea to be trampled under waves of biker jackboots, their brains dashed against the rocks on waves of Angel chains. Still coming, ceaselessly, the flower child dead horde ever trying to take a bite of Mick. How naive to think it would be anything else. The Stones weren't Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club but her Satanic Majesty's Request; they were never about peace and love in the cornball "this is called prana yoga, everybody. It gets you really high, okay?" way of (the restored footage of) WOODSTOCK, nor were they the working class yobbos like the Who. The Stones were dandies, art school and economics students, more concerned with their Carnaby Street clothes and chicks (or 'birds') and not going to jail for their Redlands scandal than protesting for peace.

As for the Angels --they had done good security for the Grateful Dead in the past, but nobody wants to rush the stage at a Dead show. Ain't no one pretty enough in that band for even the hungriest zombie to want to maim, much as Bob Weir liked to think otherwise. The Stones, however, were all very tasty. But they had already used a British chapter of the Angels at their Hyde Park Brian Jones memorial concert the previous July, but as Gadfly's David Dalton notes:

As security (for the Hyde Park performance) the (Stones) used Hell's Angels. Well, er, English Hell's Angels—the Stepney chapter. East End yobs playing at being in a motorcycle club. The Stones liked to flirt with pantomime violence—always fun and decorative, isn't it? And hadn't these rough lads given the show just that bit of Clockwork Orange frisson that the afternoon needed?

The Angel's methods may have been too brutal for the Altamont scene, but that was their common resort - it was expected that, when things get out of hand, they'd shut it down. There just wasn't good enough security otherwise all down in front of the stage and without the Angels, Mick and company would have been overrun, and possibly ripped to shreds like the very Mick-like Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer . (I bet Sebastian would have been glad to see the Angels rumble to his rescue, instead of Liz Taylor's hippie pacifist virgin, just standing by the wayside, wringing her lily white hands!!)

I remember a bouncer saving me once in a similar situation at a show in Trenton's City Gardens for the LA punk rock group X around 1984. Some guys were trying to turn the front of the stage into a mosh pit back when the days it was still called "slam-dancing" but was fast becoming far too violent for non-skinheads (thrash was ensuring bloody noses for all) and this big security guard--probably about seven feet tall--yanked me out of the way of a drunken fist flying right at my head through the melee while I stood there, lightheaded and dumbstruck. He pulled me behind him with one hand and held his own fist out and smashed it into the onrushing face of the guy who was coming right at me, halting his frame and forcing his fist to pull up inches from my face as if he'd run into a concrete wall. I got blood all over my shirt and if not for that one awesome bouncer, I'd have been knocked the fuck out and likely trampled! It was the coolest moment of my life up to then and when I looked up on stage, covered in nose blood (not mine) Exene Cervenka was smiling down at me like I'd just been baptized.

My point in recalling this anecdote is that violence is not always bad. It's just that, like the cops at the Democratic convention the previous year, the Angels do not practice "restrained" violence, especially in a situation where there's no "out" door to escort rowdy stage crashers through onto the street where they won't have to deal with the same stage crashing culprits just showing up again two minutes later. You can only try and move them back a bit, but there's no "EXIT" to dump them out to (we can follow the movements of most of the people down in front if we pick one head and keep an eye on it) and when the hippies are swarming all over you, it definitely is like Dawn of the freakin' Dead. I know. I've played block parties while tripping. Or tried to escape sold out Dead shows while tripping. Or been to the mall while tripping. Or the zoo.

The sight in GIMME SHELTER of all the crazies thinking if they stagger drunkenly enough they can just force their way to the front of the stage makes for a chilling comment on when the wrong people do drugs without observing the proper rules of set and setting. And man, Woodstock or Monterey may have been cool, but Altamont was no place to be dosing your face off, naked and insane, crawling over the tops of people. If you've seen the film you should right now be thinking of that big naked chick who shows up zonked out of her mind "down the front," near the end and just starts rubbing herself on anyone in her way, like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene, zonked and oblivious to how much discomfort she's causing, acting like the humanity before her is just so much warm loving ocean to swim through; she's a monstrous Titanic dreaming it's still afloat as the ice and waves try to shake her down off them. There's no defense; punch her and she won't even feel it, and try lifting her up and out of the crowd and see where it gets you.

And PS - there is no 'out' of the crowd, no ground on which to dump her. 

 You didn't see people crowding the stage in a mad rush over Ravi Shankar at Monterey! People were sitting in fucking chairs! There were big empty aisles... you could Exit easily... and that was only two years before Altamont. What happened?

The uncool masses, who shouldn't be given drugs, got some, is what happened. And they overdid it. Drugs aren't all good like Woodstock made it seem, nor all bad, like the sizzling eggs in the pan TV spots, but powerful, dangerous tools. Drugs might bring you enlightenment but you can't stay there in it forever, and that's a bum trip, so if you're an idiot, you try and take more and stay high, which never works. You end up trying to cut off your own hand at the gallery like Warren in PSYCH-OUT (1968).

One of the most beautiful love vibe sleepover parties I ever was at happened in a cabin in the mountains in Vermont in 1991 in the autumn: brotherly love, pure liquid LSD from Berkeley, dancing and discovery, everything became new and beautiful, the steam out of the next morning coffee cups like smoke signals from a far off mountain. It was so good, we bonded so completely, the host had a second party with all the same people, later that winter, and this time all the same "right" ingredients added up to something that was so depressing that the acid just amplified the unbearable feeling of cut-offedness. No way to claw my way out of the saran wrap of depression, short of literally clawing my way out of my own skin. Awful realization. That's GIMME SHELTER. Woodstock had been trying to be a normal concert, so enough expectations were in place that the communal vibe had the element of surprise. When you expect it to all just miraculously work, you're headed for a fall. When you expect it to be a disaster... who knows? Dionysus loves a lost cause and hates a sure thing.

As a rager tried and true, I hate to say this, but it's all about balance. You can try to redress a longstanding imbalance with drugs, but you can't "outwit" balance. All good times have a bad times bill at the end, and vice versa. No pain / no gain goes both ways. The marathon runner, the loyal worker and devoted soldier all demonstrate an intrinsic understanding of balance. In pursuing pain and avoiding lazy pleasure they find true bliss. The post-rave depression girl who pops one more hit because she just can't stand the pain, she's not helping redress the balance, just piling on the debt. You don't get a pendulum to stop swinging by pushing it harder. You have to wait.... shhhhhh. Calm down. That's what rehabs are for.... shhhh.... Fuck rehab... but... where were we? Oh yeah, when they messed with the Angels' bikes, man, they started it.

I wish I'd had a chance in this post to talk about how much I love seeing the Stones looking all hungover and adrift in the dirty south on their 1968 tour. The scene at Muscle Shoals listening to "Wild Horses," which Kim Morgan writes brilliantly about here, or the emotion-cracked voice of Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who becomes kind of the de facto soul of the band via his seat at Maysles' moviola framing device. It's all brilliant, and like all the best concert documentaries--and like the movement itself--over much too quickly. But thank the devil for the Maysles, who make sure what we do have is fuckin' awesome. GIMME SHELTER reminds us of how the biggest highs crash hardest, while giving us priceless fly on the wall glimpses of the Stones at the pinnacle of their greatness. Best of all, it captures the peak moment when the great Satanic majesty himself, Mick Jagger, realized he'd accidentally stirred up some elder god of chaos and destruction beyond his control, a juggernaut of self-absorbed drug-guzzling pain that time would dub "the Seventies." Not even Nixon could stop that all-consuming wave... what could he do but go on LAUGH-IN and say "sock it to me"?