Everyone knows the nation has been swamped by a crisis in violence, although nobody seems to know how to fix the problem. Much trauma today can be traced to the insane war on drugs that continued for decades and we have casualties on both sides. It never should have happened. Cannabis is the world’s greatest medicine and there was no need to destroy lives over a healing plant that grows everywhere.
My current mission is to build Dizzyhippieland (working title), a dogma-free ceremony site for helping those with PTSD. I will start by erecting a memorial to the victims of the war on drugs, including law enforcement officers killed and injured, as well as growers and users of marijuana.
The plan is to recruit 12 of the coolest people in the world. These volunteers will build and occupy their own hobbit homes around a lake or riverbank. There will be bike trails through the forest lit by LED lights that one can ride day and night. (My primary vehicle is a solar-powered trike called the Elf. I already have a fleet of them ready to move to the site, as well as a fleet of pedal boats.) These are the rides at Hippiedizzyland. No cars or combustion engines allowed inside and everything will be solar powered. The volunteers will be allowed to rent out their homes and/or use them to vend arts and crafts.
In April, I’ll unveil my new 420 ritual. Although I never got credit for spearheading 420, I was the first person to create 420 ceremonies outside Marin County. My new 420 ritual is based on Peter Schumann’s puppet theater and you can find an elaborate script on my Facebook page.
I was 16 when I founded my first counterculture publication in Urbana, Illinois. Ours was a fascinating town stuffed with colorful characters. Johnny Roselli was a frequent visitor as the 20-something who inherited the local TV station and newspaper was his favorite mistress. Chicago “men of honor” came down often to shoot quail in the cornfields.
More important to me, the town was a seething hotbed of revolutionary thought. This energy got focussed at the Unitarian Church on campus. A beatnik coffeeshop called The Red Herring opened in the basement.
My tribe created garage rock. I went from a shy wallflower with no friends to having supreme confidence with my new trajectory in life. The power and glory of music should not be underestimated. Music, math and spirituality ride together.
I witnessed the full illumination of the biggest local rock star Jim Cole. He transformed quick after his first public performance on the sidewalk of Green Street. Watching the footage of early Elvis on his toes, his entire body charged with electric energy, reminded me of Jim. He reached an illuminated state while his life became performance art.
Where did this power come from? Every super hottie in the twin cities wanted to eat Jim alive and they squealed with delight during his performances. Jim wasn’t the only one in the band soaking up those juices. The 15-year-old guitar player Mark Warwick wrote “Only Me,” one of the first psychedelic rock songs. The next year, I created The Tin Whistle.
After I moved to NYC, I got into punk, because I understood the connection between punk and garage rock. I founded the Soul Assassins and began creating psychopunkadelia.
Then I landed at the dying High Times, which I quickly turned into the magazine success story of the 1990s. Everything I did while at High Times was recorded on video and I hold the only copies of the footage. I kept notes, letters, audio and video tape, photos, and original art from 1964 until the present. It represents the world’s most valuable counterculture archive and is income-producing. The archive will be moving to the Church of the Holy Grail at Dizzyhippieland.
Most of the so-called cannabis churches today are hoodwinks working out-dated dogmas. I gag when I see people calling themselves “reverend this or that” or “Weed Jesus.”
I provide something different: real enlightenment. I have ransacked the history of religion and magic and distilled the ancient wisdom down to its ultimate essence. First, let your mind be free of all dogma. There is only one rule: don’t hurt anybody. Once you strip away the fake dogma, you can follow your heart, where the real Bible is already written.
My revival movement involves spreading peace culture. My ceremonies are always free to attend. I hand out hymnals and do singalongs of my spirituals, which are dogma-free.
If not for prohibition, I believe we’d have a lot more weed spirituals. You can find my hymns on my Youtube site under The Seeds of Doubt. Check out my anthem, In Search of the Grail. The real secret of the grail saga was not the cup itself but the medicine that went inside, an elixir capable of bringing peace to the kingdom. The grail story is really about the power of cannabis to bring peace.
I’m not interested in chasing money. I am interested in exposing fake gurus and weed religion carpetbaggers who spread Santa Claus stories about everlasting life.
I’m looking for a few dozen acres in the Catskills with a private lake or riverbank where I can erect a phoenix on a commanding site so that when the sun rises on April 20th, it appears between the phoenix’s wings to illuminate a crystal on top of a peace pole.
If you contribute $5 or more to building Dizzyhippieland, your name will be on that memorial (provided you rank among the first 420 donors).
Kudos to Larry Green for being the first to send a donation. Jiffy Schnack was the first volunteer. He was an artist-in-residence at Area when I first met him. Since then, Coke La Rock, Busy Bee, Grandmaster Caz, and Shawn “Ammo” McQuate have saddled for the ride.
Maybe you’d like to ride with us? I am looking for capable artists, musicians, performers, carpenters, mechanics. You’d be allowed to develop your own rockstar compound on the site if accepted onto the crew.
It’s not a full-time gig and there won’t be pay beyond room and board.
There’s nothing plastic about Dizzyhippieland, although everything is constructed cheaply. Tents, tipis, Christmas lights, and non-toxic spray paint create much of the set pieces. There will be numerous stages, saunas and massage tables because they are useful in healing. There will be fireworks and burns at the center of the lake during major ceremonies. The stage faces the lake with the sun behind it, and the lake acts as a sounding board. The music becomes magical from this lake effect.
The growth of the site will depend entirely on how many people come to the ceremonies, the first of which will occur between April 19-21, 2023.
Of course, if any cannabis companies step forward and want to help sponsor such a place, I would welcome them.
And their karma might soar because they did something for peace and not plata.
Did you know the world’s only hippie memorial is located along the Illinois Central train tracks in Arcola, Illinois? The town I grew up in was actually a hotbed of radical activity in the 1960s. The fledgling Students for Democratic Society (SDS) picked Urbana, Illinois, in fact, as the site for their 1965 conference, and hundreds of members arrived from all around the country. Soon, we had the state’s best garage band, The Finchley Boys, as well as the country’s greatest experimental artist, John Cage, both performing in our little community 120 miles south of Chicago. We also had the first landmark performance of a masterpiece called “MacBird!” which theorized JFK had been murdered and President Johnson was an accomplice in the crime.
Jim “Chef Ra” Wilson was my high school senior class president, the first black elected to that position. He organized the first black appreciation celebration in the history of Urbana High. It was held late at night and included free soul food and a series of performances by notable black musicians who were also students at the school.
him at all times, all constantly cracking up at his improv performances. The alpha chick among them was also the girlfriend of the star of the show, who played keyboards and sang, among many other talents. I remember him from the stage suddenly stopping the show to ask his girl what she was doing with her arm around Larry Green’s neck? Somehow, Larry turned that all around into a big belly laugh and the performance went on. I don’t know if any long-term inter-racial relationships were born that night, but it certainly was a wonderfully healing ceremony for all who attended and I hope we left many of our fellow black students with a sense of our appreciation for their culture, despite the institutionalized racism that had afflicted the school up until then and the fact few of us would actually try the chitlins.
In 1968, someone applied for a permit for anti-Vietnam war demonstrators to march in the annual parade and the permit was duly granted on grounds of free speech after a brief court battle even though members of the town councils wanted it denied as un-American and inappropriate. We happened to be driving past Green Street when the protestors were attacked by a gang of men wearing hard-hats, some of whom wielded clubs and chains. Jim Cole, leader of the Finchley Boys, was one of the protestors and would later describe grabbing a fist aimed at his face and then realizing it belonged to someone he knew quite well. I really felt I’d missed out on something exciting, but I wasn’t much of a street fighter anyway. My time, however, was soon coming.
The Risk of Being Ridiculous by Guy Maynard got me interested in blogging about the 1960s. Maynard grew up in Urbana, Illinois, a year ahead of me, and was one of the leading figures in the garage-band movement that started around 1966. His book takes place in 1969 and really captures the intensity of the times. I gave it a rave review in High Times and it inspired me to dig up my own archives from the 1960s, especially a short story I wrote called “The Steam Tunnels.” I was surprised at how well my story had held up over the years. I’d forgotten most of the trauma I went through in the mid-’60s. People called it a “Generation Gap” but it was really a “Generation War.”
Meanwhile, Charlie Gerron, a columnist in The Tin Whistle was stoking the flames, challenging any jock in school to a one-on-one match, and I’m sure Charlie would have gladly taken anyone on, had anyone ever accepted.
My hat must have provided the final magic touch, because Larry certainly wowed the crowd that afternoon. It may have been his first “great performance,” although certainly not nearly his last. Sauntering across the stage in a sort of Fred-Astaire-meets-Lenny-Bruce persona, Larry launched into a beatnik poem by Shel Silverstein lifted out of Playboy magazine. (I wonder if any students thought he was jivin’ off the top of his head?) When this performance was over, Larry asked everyone to vote for Jim Wilson. And then Jim took the stage and gave a very serious speech about the need to address the racial communication issues at the school, a speech that soon swept Jim into office, with all of us in full support.
You might wonder, why the hat? Larry was still under haircut rules at the time, and I had just recently escaped them. I think I wore that hat so much because it helped disguise the fact my hair was really shorter than it should have been. And I think that’s the same reason Larry employed it, as his character that day was an ultra hipster. And Larry was running against another white dude with almost shoulder-length blonde hair. So the hat may have been the perfect touch to his act. You’ll also notice that in my column for that month, I’d created these white and black devils as a comic illustration, representing, no doubt the twin paths that had emerged at the beginning of the counterculture, one of which involved violence and one of which did not.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Jim edited these responses and was going to have them read aloud in public assembly, just to show us how crazy deep our collective racism really ran. See, most of us were living in our own little worlds. Some of the more socially progressive among us certainly had no idea of the primitive beliefs being held by some of our fundamentalist fellow students, just as none of us knew the history of racism in the town, and how all blacks had been herded around the hemp factory near the railroad tracks on the north-side to live in shacks with no electricity or running water. These conditions existed up through the 1960s in some parts of the slum, although slowly a few black families had leaked into better parts of town.
The reading of selected passages of these forms caused great stress, as evident in a photo of some tearful reactions published in the yearbook as it was happening (left).
I already told you about how Iving Azoff—the most powerful person in the music industry—got his start as Bob Nutt’s associate at Blytham, Ltd., in Urbana, Illinois, in 1967. (And thanks to an original Blytham business card sent-in by Guy Maynard, we now know Irv had a short-lived predecessor in that role named Dan Dailey.)
Gary Pini is another important character in this story, and he too would eventually rise to great heights in the record industry, producing dance music singles and early rap records. The photo shows Gary on the Quad at the University of Illinois. In the background you can see the round building we used to sneak into via the Steam Tunnels that ran underneath the entire University campus (see my book, 1966). Gary is the one who took me to see the John Cage installation at the Stock Pavilion.
You’ll notice Larry wears the magic cross that was also the secret symbol of my elementary school streetgang (see “From Violent Streetgangs to Merry Pranksters”). I took both photos the same day, cut them up and glued them together to create the effect of Larry as teenage monster towering over Urbana High.
Meanwhile, The Finchley Boys were going through their own changes. Somewhere along the line, they started doing an Animals’ cover, “Outcast.” Actually, “Outcast” was originally an R&B love song Eddie Campbell and Ernie Johnson recorded in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1964. The Animals version was faster and they dropped the horn riff and replaced it with a guitar. The song rocked hard, had a powerful hook, and it instantly became a major highlight of the Finchley’s set, eventually becoming their new signature song. It was no longer a silly love song, either. Now “Outcast” stood for the position we longhairs found ourselves in, as we were not being accepted by the establishment.
Faber was the lead singer on “Outcast.” Although Faber had started as the roadie, then played harmonica on one song, he was now singing the two biggest hits the band had. One day when the band was arriving in a car together at Urbana High, Faber and Cole got into a little dispute over some minor matter and Cole announced he was leaving the band so he could concentrate on becoming a guitar player. Cole soon left high school and moved into a room on the second floor of Eric’s house, right across the hall from the padlocked room Daddy Swenson slept in.