Episode 153 - Paul Krassner
Guest:Lock the gates!
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Marc Maron.
Marc:Okay, what the fuckers, let's do this.
Marc:Are we doing it?
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, look, let me tell you the situation.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:I am Marc Maron.
Marc:I am in a car.
Marc:It is pouring out.
Marc:I'm driving through the rain.
Marc:I'm driving into the desert, to Desert Hot Springs.
Marc:I'm going to talk to Paul Krasner.
Marc:He's one of the last remaining...
Marc:counterculture Buddhas from back in the 50s, back in the 60s, back in the 70s.
Marc:Paul Krasner has been at the sidelines and in the front lines of American counterculture since it started.
Marc:Look, I was born in 1963.
Marc:By 1969,
Marc:I was, what, six or seven?
Marc:But I remember everything coming out of the TV was going into my head.
Marc:The protests, the hippie movement, the music that was around me, the I seeing like long haired kids in the street.
Marc:There was always part of me that gravitated towards that.
Marc:Mad Magazine was insanely important to me that for some reason, even as a kid.
Marc:I knew that that was the direction my life would take.
Marc:And throughout my childhood and my adolescence, I mean, I had a minibike, I think in 1970, 71.
Marc:How old was I?
Marc:Ten?
Marc:Nine or ten?
Marc:I had a minibike, and I made my parents buy me an American flag helmet like Dennis Hopper wore an Easy Rider.
Marc:Not because I had seen Easy Rider or had any real sense of what the movie meant,
Marc:But because I had a poster that I saw in New York on a trip that I took with my grandmother of Dennis Hopper flipping the bird on his bike.
Marc:And I also had a poster of the whole cast of Easy Rider with Peter Fonda in that helmet.
Marc:And a lot of this I can only...
Marc:attribute my interest to the chaos and mystery that really defined the 60s was my grandmother's neighbor the Newark's had a son named Cary who I used to go over there and I'd go in his room it was just a collage of everything that had anything to do with the 60s at that time he had a beard and mustache and long hair there were posters all over the place of everybody the Easy Rider poster included and I just thought it was fucking fascinating and I knew that that would define my life
Marc:I wasn't sure how, but my fascination remained.
Marc:I always was compelled towards 60s counterculture and then later in college into the beatniks and then later into Lenny Bruce.
Marc:But I always had a fascination with Timothy Leary because I remember seeing him around when I was a kid.
Marc:A lot of this had to do with Mad Magazine as well.
Marc:Drugs were part of it.
Marc:Long hair was part of it.
Marc:Protest was part of it.
Marc:But I really just saw images and I only knew...
Marc:From the images that that is what I wanted to be part of.
Marc:I'm not even sure what it was.
Marc:I'm not even completely sure now.
Marc:The history, my sense of history is relative to the fact that I didn't live through it.
Marc:I gleaned it.
Marc:I was fascinated by it.
Marc:I remember reading Tom Wolf's electric Kool-Aid acid test about the sort of weird two camps of acid in the 60s.
Marc:Leary being one, Kesey being the other.
Marc:But I mean that whole sort of like Merry Prankster scene with Ken Kesey, the guy who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Marc:He had a band of clowns called the Merry Pranksters that drove around in this psychedelic bus and this was at the beginning of acid and of course
Marc:Leary was running his own, you know, Zen retreat at the, I believe, the home of some wealthy person, you know, doing acid that way.
Marc:And there's this great confrontation between Leary and Kesey, who showed up, you know, Kesey, of course, showed up with his, you know, Dayglo clowns, you know, wanting some acid up at the Zen retreat in upstate New York.
Marc:I don't know the details, but I'm excited to talk to Krasner about it.
Marc:Krasner was also the co-founder of the Yippee movement with Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman and was best friends with Abby Hoffman.
Marc:And all this stuff is just pictures and fragments.
Marc:I had to steal this book.
Marc:I knew about Abby Hoffman.
Marc:I was fascinated with Abby Hoffman.
Marc:And when he came out from being underground, I went to see him speak when I was in high school, but not really having a sense of the whole picture of what it all meant.
Marc:And then, of course, Paul Krasner was a sort of protege of Lenny Bruce.
Marc:I mean, he was he edited Lenny Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, which is an important book for any comic to read.
Marc:And he really took the spirit of Lenny and moved it into print by creating The Realist, which was a a sort of a zine at the time, a satire zine.
Marc:But I think that what's important for me to understand when I talk to Paul is just the thread that runs from Lenny and Bebop, you know, through the beatniks and through the 60s and then on into the 70s and 80s with in terms of activism and protest and the the power and place that satire has in that, because there are definitely two camps of activism.
Marc:There are pranksters and clowns and people who do the big drama.
Marc:And there are people that just chip away.
Marc:They lobby, they work on legislation, they run for office.
Marc:But it seems to me that there is a thread that runs from Lenny Bruce through Krasner.
Marc:on into the the hippie movement to the hippie movement into the pranksters into acid culture on into the protests against reagan and you know and even now though the power of it is lessened yet uh... you know krasner recently wrote a piece about john stewart glenn beck and abby hoffman that i'm interested to talk to about this the evolution and also the devolving of activism and what it means and in what it means to actually fight hypocrisy in fight the power
Marc:and fight the forces that deny us our freedom.
Marc:I'm a little nervous, but I'm very happy that I know Paul a bit.
Marc:We've worked on shows together.
Marc:We've hung out a little bit together over the years.
Marc:He's very lucid.
Marc:I have no idea what to expect.
Marc:I am driving through the desert.
Marc:It's pouring out.
Marc:I'd like to think I'm risking my life for this, but there are just some things that bother me directly that have sort of stuck in my craw over the years is that the 60s and what the yippies and the hippies and that movement meant.
Marc:have really been trivialized and ridiculed and marginalized you know and and sort of you know minimized I culturally and and through the media as it just is a bunch of you know your goofballs a bunch of tie dyed idiots who stood for nothing
Marc:And, you know, in 1968, the Democratic National Convention, when the shit went down, you know, Abbie Hoffman was there.
Marc:He was one of the Chicago seven.
Marc:Krasner was at the trial.
Marc:I mean, this was real deal shit.
Marc:These people were fighting for some serious causes to stop a war and redefine what freedom means and what the power of the voice of the people means.
Marc:I mean, these were important times, you know.
Marc:Progress was made.
Marc:A war was stifled.
Marc:And Paul was there at the beginning.
Marc:And I just I just want to sit and listen.
Marc:Yeah, I want to learn about this because I can't sit there and go, OK, tell me about this.
Marc:This happened in 1960 because, you know, me, I don't do that kind of research.
Marc:But I do have an idea.
Marc:It never really dawned on me.
Marc:until yesterday when i was looking to paul stuff yeah i want to talk to about that famous realist piece about uh... you know lbj skull fucking her neck fucking the wound on the course of jfk as they were flying the body back to uh... washington and how that became
Marc:true to some people that it was assumed to be true.
Marc:I want to talk to him about Kesey.
Marc:I want to talk to him about a lot of stuff.
Marc:But what I realized is that the tone that Lenny Bruce set with his comedy in terms of the fight for First Amendment freedom really set the tone of a certain type of activism and protest that still exists today and is constantly being attacked
Marc:by centrist, pseudo-left-leaning people, by mocking it and saying it has no effect, and of course by the right, who literally are trying to erase it to this day by saying that the Tea Party movement is something akin to the grassroots movement of the 60s.
Marc:They're just trying to erase what it meant, what the 60s meant.
Marc:What Lenny Bruce meant, what acid meant, what the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention meant.
Marc:This stuff is far away from us, but it is in my lifetime.
Marc:And times have changed drastically.
Marc:But something remains of the spirit of that.
Marc:And something was important there that maybe we may risk losing it completely.
Marc:And I just want to trace that thread.
Marc:Hope Paul's up for it.
Marc:I also feel like I'm running away.
Marc:Running to the desert, seeking some wisdom.
Marc:I was actually going to do this with Shecky Green, who lives in Palm Springs.
Marc:But I think that Krasner's my, you know, he's one of those secret guides I have in my life.
Marc:I didn't realize it until yesterday.
Marc:But I don't know what the hell he's doing in Desert Hot Springs.
Marc:I guess I'll talk to him about that, too.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, you can hear the rain.
Marc:It's like hard for me to see.
Marc:Let's get to Paul's house.
Marc:So I drove through the desert, the desert hot springs, to the home of Paul Krasner.
Marc:The Buddha in the desert at this point.
Marc:And what are you doing out here?
Marc:I mean, I understand that there are problems in the world, but what are you doing here?
Marc:Desert hot spring.
Marc:Are you underground?
Marc:Have you decided to go underground even though you didn't have to?
Guest:It's as if.
Guest:I mean, I am a hermit.
Guest:We want to have a convention, but nobody will come.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I was living in Venice Beach and loved it, but the rent got higher every year.
Guest:It seemed like every month.
Guest:And it was very noisy.
Guest:And we found this great place.
Guest:Nancy found it on the internet and moved here.
Guest:And we're old enough that we got a... You've seen the ads for reverse mortgages?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's one of the few good things the government has done.
Guest:What does that mean, a reverse mortgage?
Guest:Well, you stop paying a monthly mortgage rate.
Guest:You have to be 62, at least.
Guest:And they send you a little check every month, which covers our car payment.
Guest:And then only have to pay the home tax and the insurance tax.
Guest:And so it's a very nice thing to happen.
Guest:And there's no limit.
Guest:We can live to be 110 and still get that check every month.
Marc:Well, I hope you do live to be 110.
Marc:You're certainly outliving many of your peers.
Marc:Well...
Marc:You know, when I was going over the stuff, you know, because I've known you on and off for years and I've known of you and what you've done.
Marc:And, you know, there's a lot.
Marc:Now, look, I was born in 1963.
Marc:I was two months old when Kennedy got killed.
Marc:By the time 1969 came around, I was about, you know, six or seven years old.
Marc:And my grandmother had a neighbor who had a hippie kid.
Marc:And, you know, I went into his room and I knew that the posters on the wall and everything in that room was going to map my future.
Marc:But I did not live through it.
Marc:As you did.
Marc:And as I did some research last night, you know, I'd always known that, you know, you had a relationship with Lenny Bruce, that you were there.
Marc:You've been at the, you know, in the front lines of American counterculture since its modern incarnation, really, and probably responsible for defining much of it.
Guest:Well, it was fortunate having a magazine because, you know, you could sit down with Ken Kesey for a few hours and have an interview.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a very interesting one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We both had hash T and then we had electric type.
Guest:This was before computers.
Guest:We each had an electric typewriter and we would, without speaking, I would type a question and he would type the answer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he was a writer and he wanted to choose his words carefully.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:And so if I hadn't had a magazine, that might never have come about.
Marc:But it seems to me that, like, we'll talk about the realist, but like I was just in your bathroom here at the Desert Home, and there's a pamphlet or a flyer or a program on the wall for a violin recital from 1939, and there's a six-year-old Paul Krasner playing at Carnegie Hall.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:What happened, Paul?
Marc:Why did you put down the violin?
Marc:You didn't want to have the Henny Youngman career?
Guest:Well, actually, I was playing there at Carnegie Hall, and I woke up when I was there because I had practiced myself out of my childhood, and I was kind of playing by rote with my eyes closed.
Guest:And my left leg itched.
Guest:And I knew I wasn't supposed to scratch it.
Guest:That's not professional.
Guest:And yet, you know, it got to be a fierce-ish itch.
Guest:And so there's a thing what I call the hidden laboratory of alternatives.
Guest:And up from my subconscious, I got the image of myself standing on my left leg and scratching it with my right foot.
Guest:And it worked, without missing a note of the Vivaldi Concerto in A minor.
Guest:And the audience laughed.
Guest:That was the sound I woke up to.
Guest:And I woke up to it with six-year-old sophistication, but born-again innocence, which made me see the world in a different way.
Guest:And also, I was hooked.
Guest:You know, that first laugh was free.
Guest:But it was such a... Because, you know, an individual laugh, you know, when you start early and you know if you can make your parents laugh, then they're not mad at you for that moment.
Guest:So you can see them grimacing, trying to hold back.
Guest:And so you knew that nobody's mad at you if they're laughing.
Guest:And that's also the same moment where they realize they have no control over you.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, they adapted to it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so it was a matter of conscious evolution.
Guest:I was very, very interested in the concept of infinity, infinite time and space.
Guest:And the more I thought about it, it would give me a headache because, you know, all right, let's say it's finite.
Guest:Then what's after that?
Guest:And this happened in that moment when you were six years old?
Guest:No, no, but I grew up into it as I heard, as I saw people get angry over tiny things or depressed over tiny things.
Guest:And I thought of this kind of infinite time and space, and it gave me a sense of what could be called cosmic awareness.
Marc:Okay, well, let's evolve into that, though.
Marc:So you gave up violin as a young man, and then when you became friends with Lenny Bruce, I mean, you were already doing comedy?
Guest:uh yeah when i when i first started in fact what year was that when you started doing stand-up um oh let's see it was um when i was still in college actually so it was like where were you in college uh so it was like um 19 early 50s and where were you in college
Guest:City College in New York, and there was a group called the CCSO, City College Service Organization, and we would go to hospitals and army camps and perform.
Guest:And I remember what inspired me.
Guest:There was a comic named Monty something, and he was very standard, and he did a whole bit about seducing, you know, trust me, trust me, and then you do this.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You can still trust me, trust me.
Guest:And I was offended by the aspect of deception.
Guest:That his joke was about?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And, you know, that seduction was lying in order to get laid.
Guest:That offended you?
Guest:It did.
Guest:It was like the lowest form of rape.
Guest:And so I said I wanted to make people laugh, but at stuff that I believed in and stuff that I felt strongly about.
Guest:And I took my violin out of the closet then and used it as a prop.
Guest:You did.
Guest:My first joke was, what did Eve say to Adam?
Guest:And then I would play on the violin, don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.
Guest:But then I developed it.
Guest:Did that work?
Marc:Kind of, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So do you remember the scene at that time?
Marc:Were you playing clubs or was it really specific to this college scene?
Guest:No, it was specific then.
Guest:And then when I was doing stuff for Mad Magazine, I would write a script and then they would assign it to an artist.
Marc:Oh, and that was the original Mad, so it was a comic book then?
Guest:No, at this point it was Mad Magazine.
Marc:So it was a magazine.
Guest:Yeah, and Bill Gaines, the publisher, invited me to perform at the Christmas party, and that was a thrill.
Guest:And then I got a New Year's Eve gig, then some guy arranged it for me, and I was there, and I was doing that, and then they were starting to yell,
Guest:Get off the stage.
Guest:We want to dance.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I had enough empathy that I said, yeah, you're right.
Guest:And I walked off the stage.
Guest:I didn't even ask to get paid.
Guest:At midnight, I was on the subway with a bunch of drunks.
Guest:Yeah, you didn't fight them, huh?
Guest:And I, you know, I, well, I mean, they were right.
Guest:They wanted to dance.
Guest:They didn't want to have some, you know, some freak with a little violin.
Marc:I know, but another type of person would have said, fuck you, I'm not done yet.
Guest:Yeah, I guess.
Guest:I guess.
Guest:But I wasn't comfortable about it.
Guest:And my father kept saying, oh, you're a quitter.
Guest:You're a quitter.
Guest:Oh, God.
Marc:Then you need to reopen an old wound.
Guest:But I didn't like the comedy clubs because I didn't like the smoke and the drinking cigarette smoke.
Guest:And I started in 1961 at the Village Gate.
Marc:in new york i worked there towards the end of it yeah was that uh was uh art the lugoff still the guy yes yes yes how do you like that uh it was what were you doing stand up there yeah and was a was it a lounge show was there musicians as well and uh no it was just me i mean i i rented the place and then that's where i met you at the village gate i worked there with you and when it was back they would started doing comedy again probably in the um
Marc:In the late 80s, early 90s.
Marc:And that's where I saw you, and you were on stage, and that's where that line you said, I remind you of before, that struck me as so witty on so many levels that I'll never forget it, that a colonic is an enema with an ideology.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But so at that time... All right, so you're at the Village Gate.
Marc:It's 1961, 62.
Marc:Now, what's the scene in the village at that time?
Guest:It was swirling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, because the folk singers were coming in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Besides Lenny, there was Mort Sahl.
Guest:You know, there were... They were mostly over here, though, weren't they?
Guest:Woody Allen.
Marc:In San Francisco?
Guest:Well, Mort Sahl was in San Francisco.
Guest:Woody Allen was in New York a lot.
Marc:And so he was... So you saw... Like, you saw Dylan come up and Woody Allen?
Guest:Yeah, it was...
Guest:that you know it was a very exciting time yeah and and uh uh you know we didn't know it was even had a title like counterculture but it was blossoming yeah and uh the beats had already sort of they were sort of in full swing or almost on the way out they were i think we were in terms of the evolution of counterculture which has always been you know they were the flappers and and the bohemians yeah
Guest:and the beats and the hippies kind of came next, you know, and after the hippies came the punk and then the hip hop.
Marc:So this is right between the beats and the hippies?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:About a five or six year period?
Marc:I was on the cusp.
Marc:And now when you saw, now what was the first experience with Lenny?
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:So, well, when I started The Realist, the first subscriber was Steve Allen.
Guest:And he sent out a bunch of subscriptions, and Lenny was one of them.
Guest:And it was his favorite magazine.
Guest:And he sent out a bunch of subscriptions to others.
Guest:And that's how I didn't have any advertising.
Guest:So The Realist really came outside of Lenny Bruce.
Guest:oh well yeah word of mouth and what was it what was the agenda of the realist in your mind what was your manifesto uh let's see the the uh the the the banner said free thought criticism and satire but uh i decided uh that i didn't want to people didn't even know something was satirical until they realized so i didn't want to
Guest:prevent them from the pleasure of discerning for themselves what was literal truth and what was a satirical extension of the truth.
Guest:And so when Lenny got, he was mostly in L.A., but in 1959 when he got to New York to play Town Hall, he called me because we had never met.
Guest:And so I went to, it was the Hotel America in Times Square.
Guest:He really was a patriotic
Guest:guy you know in san francisco he would stay at the swiss american on purpose yeah oh yeah yeah he liked that uh and um so um i had just uh published an interview with dr albert ellis who was a uh a writer about a very progressive writer about sexuality and he was a psychotherapist he kind of created
Guest:rational therapy and then extended that to rational emotive therapy and so in the interview I mentioned something he said well that's too fucking bad and I said you know do you and then he told me about his program his concept he said he thought that if fucking is
Guest:good thing then you should say to somebody if you want to insult them unfuck you yeah yeah and this was Lenny or Ellis no this was Dr. Ellis yeah and and so Lenny loved that he said can you get away with this is this on newsstands yeah yeah yeah and so I explained to him that just recently then the Supreme Court had defined obscenity as a you know it had to had to arouse the prurient interest among other things you know it had to give you a hard-on
Guest:Yeah, that's what it came to.
Guest:I mean, but Lenny said, prurient interest, what's that?
Guest:And he took out a huge unabridged dictionary from his suitcase that was on his bed in a hotel room.
Guest:And we looked it up.
Guest:And he said, to itch, I think that was one of the first, he said, is that like, you know, in the novelty store, they give you itching powder?
Guest:And then I said, no, essentially it means getting you horny.
Guest:And so he was intrigued by this, because he had been using Frigg, you know, that kind of euphemism on stage.
Marc:So this
Marc:was before the shit hit the fan with him yeah yeah so that's part of his he like you know the evolution of Lenny Bruce from a sort of you know mimic you know sort of you know standard comic James Cagney yeah into whatever he became you know you were sort of this was the beginning of that that his his interests were changing
Guest:yeah well his his he was talking about I mean he broke through the tradition of the old-school comics who did mother-in-law jokes and airplane food right and Chinese drivers yeah and still a popular topic now oh yes it's coming back but you know they're driving us to distraction
Guest:And so he asked me if I could give out copies of that issue, the Albert Ellis issue, in front of Town Hall that night where he was performing.
Guest:And he brought it on stage and talked about it.
Guest:And they threatened that they would never have him perform there again.
Guest:He said, oh, they will.
Guest:They made too much money.
Guest:It was a sold out show.
Guest:And he was right.
Guest:They did have him back.
Guest:And so after that, he was just obeying the laws.
Guest:But the obscenity charges were a smokescreen because they couldn't charge him with blasphemy.
Guest:But that's the reason.
Marc:So it was the Catholic Church.
Guest:Especially in Chicago.
Guest:At the trial in Chicago, one time it was Ash Wednesday, and every single one of the jurors had on an Ash on their forehead.
Guest:The bailiff did.
Guest:The prosecutor did.
Guest:And it was like a Lenny fantasy there.
Guest:Were you there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:And that was from a place called the Gate of Horn where he got busted.
Guest:And the vice squad chief came and told the owner, you know, if you let that man talk about the Pope again, you know, we're going to take away your liquor license.
Guest:You know, so clubs were afraid to hire him.
Guest:And Lenny said, you know, if you get busted in town A, then you go to town B and they want to arrest you there.
Marc:Now, when you hung out with this guy, I mean, obviously you were both sort of informing each other, you know, and your own art.
Marc:I mean, you were writing this this magazine and he was taking these chances and pushing the First Amendment to get for a point.
Marc:And he was aware of this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, when when you sort of hung out with him, I don't it's hard for me to believe.
Marc:And I think it's hard for a lot of people to put Lenny into context or even understand, you know, how important what you were doing, what Lenny was doing at this time.
Marc:Because, you know, he gets trivialized.
Marc:Everyone just sort of mentions Lenny Bruce.
Marc:But I mean, you know, when you guys are in this, I mean, what is the feeling in the room?
Marc:I mean, you know, I picture Lenny, you know, as a manic sort of, you know, careless in a way, a little reckless personality who was really, you know, half, you know, thriving on, you know, putting his ass on the line like this, but also like really not knowing what the results were going to be.
Guest:Well, after the arrest started, he kind of knew.
Guest:You know, he saw the pattern.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But, I mean, the thing is that now that people hear of him like a free association, they think Lenny Bruce obscenity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Language.
Guest:When he talked about nuclear testing, he talked about teachers' low salaries as opposed to show business' high salaries.
Guest:He talked about abortion rights.
Guest:He talked about legalizing marijuana.
Guest:So it was a whole new world of subjects that had been taboo.
Guest:And so he knew, you know, he wasn't trying, he was only trying to perform on stage with the same freedom that he had in his own living room.
Guest:I mean, that was his goal, as my goal was, which was to communicate without compromise.
Guest:But what kind of guy was he?
Guest:And how old were you when you were hanging out with him?
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:I was 27, and he was, I think, five years older than me.
Guest:Really?
Guest:So you were young guys, and this was exciting?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, he met me.
Guest:He said, come on, you're just a front.
Guest:You have some gargantua locked up in your closet who's really putting out the magazine, and you're just a front.
Marc:well it's just interesting to me that like you know because obviously you know as a comic myself and knowing other comics in my life and the kind of lives we lead you've somehow taken care of yourself you know you're still alive you're lucid and and it's always been i guess i romanticize you know the life of lenny bruce as being something you know incredibly chaotic and and and full of drama and that you know as you know i have no sense of him you know as a as a person sitting across from another person or having these intimate moments that you had with him
Marc:Was he frightened?
Marc:Did he realize that everything was changing around him?
Guest:He didn't want to be the victim.
Guest:I remember once being in an elevator in a hotel he was staying at.
Guest:um he and he was very paranoid you know he had uh wires going under the rug he wanted to tape uh uh somebody from the you know he was really paranoid but it was just justified because they were after him yeah and so he um he would we were in the elevator and he said something like 17 please
Guest:And we're suddenly on the 25th floor.
Guest:And he said, oh, I'm sorry.
Guest:I said 17.
Guest:Maybe I didn't say it loud enough.
Guest:He took the blame for it.
Guest:And so the elevator operator took us down to 17.
Guest:And he gave her a $10 tip.
Guest:because he didn't want her to feel bad.
Guest:So little things like that were meaningful.
Guest:And what about, you stayed away from the narcotics yourself?
Guest:I wasn't doing any drugs then, and I do remember one time, and Lenny and I had an unspoken agreement that because it was against the law, there wouldn't be anything about that in the book.
Guest:I talked about that.
Guest:What was he mostly doing, benzodrine?
Guest:He was let's see he would one time he had contacts in New York, and he had a lot of it was prescription so The de lauded was what was one of the things so he was already into the opiates yeah, and big he So he would send a telegram to a friend in New York and saying the Lord is in the sky is something like that yeah, and they and this prescription would come by mail, uh-huh and
Guest:And so, and at one point, you know, he threw up at one point, and I said to him, you know, you're such a free-form guy in your life and in your performances, and yet, you know, you're kind of, in effect, a slave to dope, which is a dumb thing for me to do, but I had like a really naive streak, too.
Guest:And he said, oh, yeah, he said, and you're addicted to food.
Guest:You know, oh, I'm so hungry now.
Guest:I need a fix.
Guest:He said, you're going to just say that you picked me up in the alley and saved my life.
Guest:Are you going to talk about that at literary parties?
Guest:And I said, Lenny, no.
Guest:He said, all right, I want you to take a lie detector test.
Guest:and i said look if you can't trust me um uh we can't work together and i left i came back to new york and um got a telegram from him as if we had been divorced please daddy can't we try again you know that kind of thing so did you get a sense that you know that he was going to go down like he went down i mean did was there a point where it got so out of control that you realized that you you had lost him somehow
Guest:Well, I remember in that December, it was 61 to 62, when he got busted at the gate of Horn in Chicago.
Guest:And I flew to Chicago, and he was on stage.
Guest:And he saw me come in, and he heard me laugh, which was just like his laugh, just one big ha!
Guest:But he was saying to the audience then, I want all of you to take a lie detector test.
Guest:So he had expanded his request of me.
Guest:And I was paranoid too because I believed that he meant it literally.
Guest:He might have just said that.
Guest:We weren't going to actually just get a, what do you call it?
Guest:What was his fear, that you would rat him out?
Guest:uh did i did i uh in effect yeah yeah and and it was understandable because i was so naive in asking him about drugs you know right but then we got to talking to about it yeah and he would say things like uh you know it's like kissing god and i said okay i'm not going to argue with that yeah yeah it's like kissing god as it kills you
Guest:Well, yeah, but he didn't think it was killing him.
Guest:I tracked it down because there was some heroin going around at the time which was not stepped on.
Guest:It was relatively more pure than it was usually sold.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so there was suspicion that he had been killed.
Guest:Got a hot shot.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And wanted to know who was behind it.
Guest:And I tried to track that down.
Guest:And I finally found out from his mother, Sally Marr.
Guest:And we were there with her.
Guest:It would have been Lenny's stepfather, her husband.
Guest:And she was talking to him about that.
Guest:about who got Lenny that stash.
Guest:And she said to him, it's okay, don't feel bad.
Guest:Lenny would have done the same for you.
Guest:So his stepfather was the dealer, he's dead now, so I can say it, who gave it to him or sold it to him.
Guest:It was too good, is what it was.
Guest:He didn't know.
Guest:He didn't know it was cut.
Guest:That it wasn't cut.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:I'm sorry, I was thinking about my penis.
Marc:But it's it's just interesting to me that like I guess the the broader you know topic you know in in terms of you know certain victories were won by by you and Lenny in the sense that you know the First Amendment you know the parameters of it became you know more clear and that you know I think certain freedoms were won don't you through the struggle of Lenny Bruce and through what you guys were doing with the realists that that you you push the line and
Guest:Well, you know, we don't know a single comedian who is afraid to say stuff on stage because he might get arrested.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I heard of one, a conservative comic, it might have been in Vegas, I'm not sure, where he did some joke and had to do in a circuitous way about...
Guest:uh, assassinating Hillary Clinton.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:And somebody complained and a letter to the editor and somebody in the secret service approached him.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And they told him that he should not do that joke again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's the only thing I've heard, uh, along those lines.
Guest:And that, and that's, uh, of a different, uh, uh, character, uh,
Marc:But I think that's interesting is that years later that, you know what, now Playboy was very supportive of cutting edge satirists.
Marc:And there were guys in the 70s along with you that were doing some pretty hard core shit.
Marc:And Hefner was into it because Hefner saw the fight for First Amendment right, freedom, so he could push the envelope with boobs, right?
Marc:And that most of the First Amendment issues around
Marc:the 60s and 70s were about profanity and about TNA, correct?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And in fact, Hefner, as much as he admired Lenny, but he still tried to keep the magazine at some middle level so that at that point, remember pubic hair?
Guest:Well, they wouldn't show any.
Guest:It was airbrushed off.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now, they don't have to airbrush it off because all of those women are shaving their pussies.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:No one's got it anymore.
Marc:And also, I think that you established some credibility in terms of the power of satire, you know, in writing that line between reality and truth with the with the piece on the Kennedy assassination.
Marc:Yeah, that, you know, the fact that I don't know that people know that story, but you published a story.
Marc:What was it?
Marc:What it was a specific satire of a book at the time, correct?
Guest:Yeah, it was by William Manchester titled The Death of the President.
Guest:And it was supposed to be published in 1967.
Guest:first serialized in Look Magazine and then published.
Guest:But it was an authorized biography and Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy refused to let it be printed there.
Guest:There were rumors it had something to do with
Guest:Lyndon Johnson, and so I tried, with my contacts in the publishing industry, to get a copy of the original manuscript, but I couldn't, so I was forced to write it myself.
Guest:And it was an exercise in, I didn't know the official name for that, Apocrypha,
Guest:And I just tried to nurture the incredible in a credible context and so established it with like the onions of a layer, starting off with some total truth like Lyndon Johnson
Guest:had called jack kennedy's father this was during the primaries a uh a nazi sympathizer which is what he was when he was uh the ambassador to england yeah and um i'm sure he'd like to see himself just as a businessman oh yeah yeah you know selling liquor with the mafia sure yeah and so um he um
Guest:And so I started with that, and then I would work my way to things that the media people knew, but the general public didn't, like the affair with Marilyn Monroe.
Guest:And so that kind of spread around, word of mouth.
Guest:And then where I made up stuff totally, but by this time, there was enough verisimilitude that it was like I was...
Guest:Credible.
Guest:Yeah, so I was trying to seduce the readers into just... Believing it.
Guest:Yeah, or at least being stunned by it because everything else worked.
Guest:And so there were people who did believe that this moment of...
Guest:of necrophilia, presidential necrophilia, quoting Jackie, saying at one point that she walked in, this was on Air Force One, and she walked into this part of the plane where she saw Lyndon Johnson leaning over the corpse of Kennedy,
Guest:And moving in a kind of strange way.
Guest:And Jackie at first thought that it was some kind of Indian ritual because he had worked with Indians as a senator, you know, before he went into politics, LBJ did.
Guest:And then she said, and then I realized that there's only one way to say this.
Guest:He was fucking my husband in the throat wound.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Guest:And then I had quotes from the Warren Commission Report on questions.
Guest:You know, was there semen in the bullet hole?
Marc:And this became a meme in the culture that people believed.
Guest:It did.
Guest:It did.
Guest:Some people even visualized it and thought they saw it.
Guest:I mean, a lot of people believed.
Guest:I was shocked.
Guest:I mean, very intelligent people...
Guest:believed it.
Guest:I mean, a Neiman Fellowship journalist believed it.
Guest:Lawyers believed it.
Guest:Daniel Ellsberg believed it.
Guest:And I asked him, I said, you believe that because you know that kind of stuff goes on with the CIA.
Guest:He says, I believed it because I wanted to.
Guest:So people believed it if only for a moment.
Guest:But in that moment,
Guest:They realized that they had admitted to themselves that Lyndon Johnson was crazy.
Guest:You know, the leader of the Western world.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But as a satirical point, what it also spoke to is that power will do anything.
Marc:Yes, right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And it had to do with the Vietnam War, which was going on then.
Marc:So like the weird thing to me, like I'm sitting here listening to you and I guess what I'm trying to get in my head is that people like Ken Keyes, who wrote Cuckoo's Nest and was this spectacular bigger than life character in my head.
Marc:Tim Leary was like so larger than life to me as a young man.
Marc:And then, you know, as his myth grew that, you know, you were sitting here with these people, you know, like just like me and you were sitting Lenny Bruce as well.
Marc:And I guess there's some part of me that wants to think that they have superhuman powers, but they're just people, right?
Guest:Yeah, but they were... Well, I'll tell you, because this goes back to crossing the line between objectivity and subjectivity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I was writing something and Abby was writing something on Revolution for the Hell of It.
Guest:I thought that was a great title.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we had this meeting on the afternoon of December 31st, 1966, at Abby and Anita's house.
Guest:And...
Guest:As a journalist, I knew that you had to have a who for the who, what, when, where, and why.
Guest:And so I could feel some kind of brainstorm coming on.
Guest:I went into their bedroom to try and think of what would work.
Guest:And the hippies had become radicalized.
Guest:and I was giving a name to a phenomenon that already existed, you know, because they would go, because there were the straight people, the politicos, who wore suits and ties and had short hair, and there were the hippies who started, they started out in an adversarial relationship, but then we saw them at anti-war rallies and at civil rights demonstrations, and there was a kind of cross-fertilization that took place.
Guest:Between Hayden's crew, which was the SDS?
Guest:Yeah, and the other respectable group.
Guest:Because the hippies thought that the politicos were fading into the administration's hands by even recognizing this war.
Marc:By playing on the same game.
Marc:By thinking they were centrists, or the equivalent of centrists.
Guest:Yeah, and on the other hand, the straight politicos thought that the hippies were being irresponsible by just having a smoking in the park until they realized that they were committing an act of civil disobedience against an unjust law, the marijuana laws.
Guest:And the kids dug it.
Guest:Yeah, and the hippies began to understand that...
Guest:What was going on in Vietnam was that arresting kids here for smoking a flower, as Lenny called it, that the ultimate extension of that dehumanization in order to do that was happening when they were dropping napalm on kids on the other side of the globe, and they saw that connection.
Guest:And that's what the Yippies were about, but with humor.
Guest:Phil Oaks summed it up.
Guest:Phil Oaks was a folk singer who was one of the most political folk singers around, and witty, and a good musician.
Guest:And he summed it up when he said, a demonstration should turn you on, not turn you off.
Guest:And so when I came up with the names Yippies, well, I started with something that would lead to Yippies, because it rhymed with hippies.
Guest:and I started going, you know, Kids International Federation, or Keefe, you know, I thought that, but that was kind of corny and contrived.
Guest:But then I came up with YIP, because that would perfectly, organically, be called the Yippies, out of YIP.
Guest:And so then I just had words, you know, proper words, and it came, you know, like a flash, Y would be for youth, because...
Guest:What was going on then was essentially a youthful revolution.
Guest:I, for international, because it was happening in Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Paris.
Guest:It really was worldwide.
Guest:And party, in both senses of the word.
Guest:You know, political party and party.
Guest:And so then when we held our first press conference, as the yippies...
Guest:there were headlines in the Chicago papers, yipes, the yippies are coming.
Guest:And so it was manipulation of the media, but it was mutual because if we gave them good quotes, they would give us free publicity for demonstrations that they were gonna be at.
Marc:It's interesting to me that Abby had this innate respect for Lenny Bruce and that they were both sort of manic, Jewish, intelligent, charismatic dudes who really saw the power of humor to blow minds.
Guest:Well, interestingly enough, when the Diggers in San Francisco, which was kind of like an anarchistic Mary Worth group, they served food to the people in the park, they had events, and they had a garage called the Free Frame of Reference.
Guest:And I expected to see, they had big posters at that time, like four feet by five feet.
Guest:And I expected to see one of Tim Leary there, but they had a poster of Lenny Bruce.
Guest:So he was articulating their consciousness.
Marc:Well, I think he set this sort of standard.
Marc:He seemed to open the door, the realist as well, to this idea that freedoms were being infringed upon on not only a legal level, but also on the level of how the media and how the politics and the cultural tone
Marc:was really keeping people self-censoring and also you know censoring on other ways so to push that envelope it just seems that the natural legacy of lenny and and you sort of you know managed to sort of live through all of it is that you know abby said look you know if we become a spectacle and we push the same buttons when he bruce was pushing with with pure political intent by being you know you know clowns for the most part
Marc:And thinking of these elaborate pranks that I think you helped think of as well, whether it was, you know, wearing the American flag or didn't they run a pig for office?
Marc:And that, you know, that it would it may not be definable to the status quo, but the kids would be like they're sticking it up the ass of the power that the powers that be.
Marc:And they're identifying us as someone with power.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, a good example of that connection that you're talking about is I had told Abby about once when Lenny was in a courthouse and all the reporters were asking, you know, do you believe in obscenity?
Guest:Do you believe in obscenity?
Guest:And he ran into the bathroom and took...
Guest:pieces of paper towel and wet them and spelled out in the mirror, fuck, on his forehead.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that he would go out there figuring, okay, they're not going to take my photo now because it says fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I told that story to Abby and when we were in Chicago...
Guest:Abby decided to do that, and he had a friend who she put lipstick, she wrote it in lipstick on his forehead.
Guest:Fuck.
Guest:And so when we went outside, we were going to go out for breakfast, and waiting across the street from where we were staying was a police car with the two, a plainclothes car, with two plainclothes guys who were following us everywhere.
Guest:And so Abby made the mistake of tipping his hat to them.
Guest:And so, you know, maybe a half hour later when we're having breakfast, they came in and arrested him.
Guest:They said, take off your hat.
Guest:He said, no.
Guest:And they flipped his hat off and there was Spock and they said, okay.
Guest:And they...
Guest:arrested him.
Guest:And he didn't want to.
Guest:He said, no, it's the duty of a revolutionist to finish his breakfast.
Guest:But they weren't convinced and they left and they forced me to finish his breakfast.
Marc:And who bailed him out?
Guest:Oh, he got bailed out.
Guest:I don't remember specifically who.
Guest:And this was for the protest for the 68th convention?
Guest:This was in Chicago during the convention.
Marc:Now, didn't you get a sense that in the midst of all this shit that this was crazy?
Marc:That like every fucking five seconds there were cops coming around?
Marc:That someone was going to get busted in your crew?
Marc:You didn't know whether you're going to get your heads rammed in?
Marc:Wasn't there a menace?
Guest:Well, Abby wrote a piece for the realists saying, you know there might be police violence because you've been to other rallies and seen it happen.
Guest:And there was.
Guest:It was crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We went to Chicago before the convention, once before, to try and get a permit for the revolution.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, just for kids to sleep in the park.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, we had arguments.
Guest:You know, you permitted the Boy Scouts to sleep in the park.
Guest:We're trying to avoid any confrontation.
Guest:And I remember we had the meeting in Mayor Daley, his assistant, David Stahl.
Guest:As we were getting up to leave, he said to me, come on, what do you really want to do in Chicago?
Guest:And I said, well, didn't you ever see...
Guest:Wild in the Streets.
Guest:And this was about a bunch of adolescents taking over the government.
Guest:They put acid into the water supply, and they passed a law lowering the vote to 14 years old.
Guest:And so the mayor's deputy assistant says to me, oh, we've seen Wild in the Streets.
Guest:We've seen Battle of Algiers.
Guest:And Battle of Algiers was... Yeah, I've seen that film about the French resistance.
Guest:Yeah, and black and white made to look like a kind of documentary, really.
Guest:And there was one scene in there where women are crossing the border in their burkas.
Guest:And so you couldn't, maybe you could see their eyes.
Guest:And...
Guest:You know, sexism made the security people not even think that women could do anything like that.
Guest:But they had bombs under their burqas.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then the camera takes, there's a cafe and you can see little kids eating ice cream knowing that they're going to be blown up in a few minutes along with everybody else.
Guest:That's what their police force was convinced was gonna happen.
Guest:What happened in Chicago was a clash between our rhetoric and their rhetoric.
Marc:A lot of heads got bashed in, though.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But the thing is that there was a biker who offered to be Jerry Rubin's bodyguard.
Guest:He was very flattered and he said, sure.
Guest:So he had a beard and a leather jacket and all that.
Guest:But when the trial, the conspiracy trial came, it turned out he was a police informer and provocateur.
Guest:He was clean-shaven now, and his name was Bob Pearson.
Guest:This was the Chicago 7 trial?
Guest:Yeah, Chicago 8 counting.
Guest:Bobby Seals.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he himself wrote for some detective magazine, Bob Pearson, saying how he was the one who helped lower the American flag.
Guest:He was the one who taunted and threw things at the cops.
Guest:They didn't recognize him even though.
Guest:And and that was the tipping point for the cops to go in with the battle with their.
Marc:Oh, so Jerry Rubin's bodyguard was an informer provocateur who sent the signal to start the beatings.
Guest:Well, it wasn't so much that he was sending a signal because they didn't know he was a provocateur.
Guest:No, but I mean, but the cops did.
Guest:No, the cops didn't know.
Guest:But he was throwing rocks at them and cursing.
Guest:So he started the shit?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, isn't that something?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's why the official report on violence in America, it was a government thing, they concluded in their report, the Walker report, that it was a police riot that happened there.
Marc:So it's just interesting.
Marc:So the Chicago 7 trial, which were the Chicago 8 trial, you know, that brought up a lot of the stuff around the American flag.
Marc:And they they they bound Bobby Seals up.
Marc:And, you know, he sort of was completely censored.
Guest:Literally.
Guest:They were shackled to a chair and a gag stuffed in his mouth and taped over it.
Guest:It was one of the most shocking scenes.
Guest:When people hear that today, they don't believe that could happen in an American court.
Marc:And why did they do that to him?
Guest:because his lawyer was sick and he wanted to defend himself and they wouldn't let him.
Guest:The judge said that he had to go with Bill Kunstler and Lenny Weinglass, the lawyers who were handling other defendants, and he didn't want it.
Guest:He either wanted his own lawyer or to do it.
Guest:And he was shouting, I have the constitutional right to defend myself.
Guest:They shut them down like that.
Guest:They shut them down literally.
Marc:That just shows to me, like at that time, that whatever you guys were doing, and it's the same, not so much with Lenny earlier than that, was that they were frightened.
Marc:I mean, that the legal system was frightened of you guys, and the government was frightened of you guys.
Guest:Well, because they didn't know what was... You know, after I said that we... Because they killed kids at Kent State.
Marc:I mean, this is all happening in the same few years.
Guest:In 1970, they did, yeah.
Guest:And this was just three years before that.
Guest:But, you know, my line about did you see Wild in the Streets...
Guest:I didn't say it, but where they threw LSE into the water supply, they then assigned National Guard to guard the reservoirs.
Guest:That became a real thing to them.
Guest:They thought that we might do it.
Guest:They didn't want to take the responsibility.
Guest:If it did happen, it didn't.
Guest:We didn't throw acid in the water.
Guest:It even became a member of Trivial Pursuits, and they had one for the 60s.
Guest:One of the questions was, whose idea was it to put acid in the water supply in Chicago during the convention?
Guest:And the answer was, moi.
Guest:Yeah, you did it?
Guest:Yeah, that's, you know.
Marc:There you are on the card, Paul Krasner.
Guest:Yeah, official, official.
Marc:But it seemed to me that, you know, without engaging in the conspiracy theories, that the yippies, the hippies, you know, Hayden's organization and everything you guys did, did, you know, change public opinion about the Vietnam War and I think did, you know, sort of hasten the end of it.
Marc:Do you believe that?
Guest:Well, it's hard to know.
Guest:I mean, I think the Viet Cong should get some credit.
Guest:But there was input in terms of the slogan became the whole world is watching when they saw what they were doing.
Guest:But that was you guys.
Marc:I mean, that you were able to change from, that there was that shift.
Guest:Yeah, it was not just the war because it influenced people in terms of... Music and everything.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, that it was... Everything was changing.
Guest:That there was another way.
Marc:Eisenhower's America was like being dismantled completely.
Guest:In fact, you know, the most feedback I got and still get from people who were subscribers to The Realist was, it changed my life.
Guest:It woke me up.
Guest:Nothing was ever the same.
Guest:I couldn't trust the government again.
Guest:My favorite of that was from George Carlin, who said that he was doing The Weatherman and all these characters.
Guest:He said every month that The Realist came, it challenged him to go a step further, to peel off another layer.
Guest:It inspired him that if I could do it in The Realist, he could do it on stage, which was to say what he really felt
Guest:and not try to cater to a particular audience.
Guest:And that is what is... I didn't make money off the realist, but that was so gratifying.
Guest:Coming from Carlin, because he's influenced so many people, not just comics, but people, again, who were awakened by his...
Guest:satire right because you know a good good satire holds the truth within it sort of like a pasta fazool you know every macaroni has its own beans yeah and so they would laugh at it and the moment they're laughing especially an audience they're unified by accepting that truth
Guest:in the guise of a joke.
Marc:And their mind might be blown in that moment to completely think about things in a different way.
Marc:And that Lenny to you, to Abby, but also Lenny to George Carlin, to Richard Pryor, that he set a sort of template for that type of honesty.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it was all, you know, they had different styles.
Guest:So Lenny just developed stuff on stage and something that would start as a throwaway line could develop into a whole bit.
Guest:Whereas George Carlin wrote everything down and memorized it.
Guest:But what they both had in common, and also Richard Pryor, were that they were self-educated.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, they didn't let their education be spoiled by higher learning.
Marc:Good for them.
Marc:But I also think I believe that, you know, if you listen to the point where Richard Pryor did what Lenny did was, you know, mid-career said, you know, I got to get real for whatever reason that I think that those early albums were Richard Pryor's just becoming Richard Pryor.
Marc:he literally has a Lenny-ish kind of cadence.
Marc:It was clear to me that he listened to Lenny.
Marc:And that, like, even me, you know, it took me years to really sort of understand Lenny Bruce.
Marc:And even when I read The Realist, that you guys are talking on a number of levels, that you don't see that type of writing anymore, and you certainly don't hear that kind of comedy anymore.
Marc:I mean, if you listen to the Berklee concert, you gotta listen.
Marc:Yeah, and those still exist on albums.
Marc:One thing before I get too far away from it, now, you gave Groucho Marx acid,
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:The background of that is that Otto Preminger, who was one of the people that Tim Leary turned on, that he did a picture, a movie in 1967 or 68 called Skidoo.
Guest:and it was about a hippie who goes to prison, and his girlfriend sends him a letter that's been soaked in liquid acid, and he puts it into the water supply of the prison.
Marc:A lot of water supplies being... Yeah, I know.
Guest:It seems to be a pattern.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And there was kind of simplistic things.
Guest:So one guy said, oh, I'm never going to rape anybody again.
Guest:Simplistic, but also it was essentially pro-acid.
Guest:The movie was because it made people be introspective about their own lives and not...
Guest:not be uh and also freak out and perhaps you know fall off the deep end occasionally well something well they just were looking at uh at crazy colors while people were escaping yeah yeah um and so uh so groucho originally george raff was going to play the part of god a mafia chieftain but uh he couldn't do it for some reason and at the last minute they got groucho to play god
Guest:he thought it would be good on his resume.
Guest:And so he had read The Realist and gave a blurb for one of my first books saying, by the way, that I would turn out to be the last live Lenny Bruce.
Guest:And so when I went out there, I had dinner with him, and he asked me if I could get him some good LSD.
Guest:He was, you know, without saccharine or arsenic or whatever they put in it.
Guest:And I said, yes.
Guest:And then he invited me to accompany him on the trip.
Guest:And I did not play hard to get.
Guest:And so we arranged to have it at this home of an actress.
Guest:And I was used to playing rock and roll when I tripped.
Guest:But...
Guest:The only albums that she had in this house was Broadway shows and classical music.
Guest:It was a bad trip.
Guest:And so I played those.
Guest:I was playing the Bach Cantata No.
Guest:7.
Guest:And Groucho says at one point, how come I'm supposed to be Jewish and I'm seeing these beautiful visions of Gothic cathedrals?
Guest:And I said, oh, that's funny.
Guest:I was seeing honeybees making honey.
Guest:It's very subjective.
Guest:So you tripped with Groucho.
Marc:How long have you spent eight hours bouncing off the wall?
Guest:Oh, no, not eight hours.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It was several.
Guest:I don't remember exactly how long.
Guest:Did he have a good time?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, he went in to urinate at one point.
Guest:And he comes back.
Guest:He says, you know, the whole human body is a goddamn miracle.
Guest:Oh, then played a song from this Broadway play called Fanny with Ezio Pinza.
Guest:These are all outdated references, but I was being channeled by Dennis Miller.
Guest:Even before him, but yeah.
Guest:And so there was a song in there called Welcome Home.
Guest:And it says, welcome home, says the chair.
Guest:Welcome home, says the picture.
Guest:And he started doing his Groucho Marx walk there, saying hello to the table.
Guest:And it was very charming.
Guest:And then there was one point where his eyes began to tear up.
Guest:And he said, I'm crying, but I'm not sad.
Guest:And we talked about his TV show, You Bet Your Life.
Guest:And he said his favorite contestant was an elderly gentleman who was very chipper.
Guest:And I asked him, what makes him so happy?
Guest:And I, being Groucho, asked him.
Guest:And he said, well, every morning he gets up and he makes a decision to be happy that day.
Guest:And Groucho said he was charmed by that because he didn't think of it as a matter of choice.
Guest:It's true.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, didn't you, like when you were hanging out with Kesey or Cassidy or Abby or Leary or, you know, this Groucho sounds like a good experience.
Marc:And weren't there any freakouts?
Marc:I mean, come on, there must have been one freakout.
Marc:I mean, bad trips.
Guest:Oh, well, Abby had one at Woodstock when he was tripping on acid, and he wanted to go on stage with the message that John Sinclair was the manager of the MC5.
Guest:Right, the White Panthers.
Guest:That's right, that's right.
Guest:And MC5 was in Detroit and stood for Motor City 5.
Guest:And...
Guest:He had been given 10 years for two joints.
Guest:And Abby wanted to go on and say, that's the politics behind all the music.
Guest:But he went on while The Who was on.
Guest:And Peter Townsend smashed him in the head with his guitar.
Guest:And said, get the fuck off my stage.
Marc:And there was the beginning of punk rock.
Marc:uh well uh it was that was the changing of the guard early tremors yeah really the channels of communication and information were were limited you know you had three networks uh and you really sort of like in order to punch through into the news i mean you really had to punch through and there were no there was mad magazine there was no
Guest:satire magazine for adults.
Guest:This was before Spy, before National Lampoon.
Marc:But I guess my question is that outside of Bill Hicks and Stan Hope to some degree, in terms of humor, Bill didn't get truly popular and understood until he died, except by a few people who were loyal early on.
Marc:And he was radically angry and very intelligent.
Marc:And now it just seems that everything is very easily co-opted and that the sort of the trick that you once played, you know, in terms of like, is it real?
Marc:Is it not real?
Marc:No longer fucking matters to anybody almost.
Marc:And that the prank, the ability to pull a prank off becomes limited.
Marc:And usually pranks are done just for prank sake.
Marc:And that I guess that, you know, the type of activism that you did and the type of discourse it created in the culture, it almost seems impossible to manufacture that now on a human level.
Guest:But it evolves along with everything else.
Guest:The nature of protest and organizing changed completely when the Internet appeared on the scene.
Guest:And so it has many different forms, what I refer to as the spirit of Yippie.
Guest:Everything from...
Guest:Well, the best example is the WikiLeaks.
Guest:Yeah, that is a great example.
Guest:Because we had lapel buttons that we wore in the 60s.
Guest:One was, the information is free.
Guest:The other said, no secrets.
Guest:Because the basis of the secrets that they're revealing is, and they're trying to get him into a conspiracy, those were the conspirators.
Guest:He's revealing the conspiracies.
Marc:Well, it's very interesting because that, more than anything else, more than Stewart or anybody else, or even Hicks to a certain degree, what that guy did with the WikiLeaks
Marc:and how they're treating it, you know, the media globally, that is closer to what Lenny and Abby did than anything I've seen in the last 10 to 15 years.
Marc:But they can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Marc:I mean, that shit was real.
Guest:You know, and there's so much stuff in it.
Guest:What really interested me was the fact that the United States took credit for a bombing that Yemen actually did.
Guest:And it was like, it reminded me of when Andy Young, who was an assistant to John Edwards, that he said he was the one who knocked up the mistress of John Edwards.
Guest:It's the same thing.
Marc:Well, that's always gone on, is that you've got these provocateurs, these shills, these payoffed people, these believers who are willing to do anything to undermine the truth.
Marc:And that government sponsored that.
Marc:that you know it really i even really wrapped my head around it but i guess for you in the last you know uh you know decade or so you know has this wiki leagues been the sort of like you know you know now we're on to something moment that maybe you know that the spirit still exists or do you see this in smaller things as well because i have to assume that at some point being involved with what you were involved with the idea was to you know to blow the minds of everybody and change just you know turn the ship around so everyone's not getting fucked one way or the other by the government and by corporations
Guest:Oh, well, all right.
Guest:The best example that comes to mind is the Yes Men.
Guest:Do you know their words?
Guest:Yeah, they're great.
Guest:All right.
Guest:They have brilliantly thought out and executed pranks that have gotten worldwide attention.
Guest:Activism through satire.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And satire in and of itself, if it's done well, is activism.
Marc:On some level.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:Because it's designed to reveal the truth.
Guest:Look, it all starts with consciousness.
Guest:And if good satire is one vehicle for expanding consciousness, then it's important work.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I appreciate you talking, Paul.
Guest:Well, you know how I've watched how the language evolves.
Guest:And, you know, people used to say thank you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or they say you're welcome.
Guest:And when they were being thanked by a TV show host.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then and then that became after a while, no problem.
Guest:And then it was my pleasure.
Guest:And now I think it's thanks for having me.
Guest:OK.
Guest:Well, thanks for being had.
Guest:But I want to tell you that this has been really stimulating for me, and I appreciate it.
Guest:Okay, cool, man.
Thank you.
Marc:Okay, well, that was a little journey through time.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:That was actually a journey through time as an interview and a journey through actual the desert, through the actual desert for me.
Marc:So that's it.
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Marc:Alright, I gotta go.
Guest:I'm tired.