White Bicycles (31 page)
Working with Stanley Kubrick was fascinating, but consisted of little more than taking orders. When I compressed the copy on the back of the soundtrack LP for
Clockwork Orange
by crediting ‘G. Rossini’ instead of ‘Gioacchino Rossini’, I was woken at 6 a.m. in LA by Kubrick insisting I stop the presses and restore the full spelling of the composer’s first name.
My ties to England remained close. My Scottish girlfriend, Linda Peters, followed me to Los Angeles, went back to London, came out again. We broke up and got back together several times. Finally, she stayed in England, married Richard Thompson and became his singing partner.
MY CONTACT IN THE Warner Brothers publicity department was Don Simpson, the man destined to become the symbol of ’80s Hollywood excess, producer of
Top Gun
,
Beverly Hills Cop
and
Flashdance
and victim in 1996 of an overdose of prescription drugs. He was bright, well read (barring anything written before 1960 or in Europe) and very ambitious. The California self-improvement cults fascinated him, Scientology in particular. He had read of an experiment conducted at the Stanford University Research Laboratory cyclotron in which psychics were asked to bend the path of an accelerated electron. Ingo Swann, a Scientologist, was the most successful, and of the seven other ‘benders’, four were Scientologists. He was intrigued to hear about my experiences with the String Band.
Don liked quoting a William Burroughs story about a man who ventures into the rainforest in search of a tribal ritual with extraordinary powers of spiritual transformation. When he reaches the jungle clearing and meets the witch doctor, he discovers that the experience involves ‘fucking the sacred crocodile’. Don and I made a pact: we would fuck the crocodile and find out what was so powerful about Scientology.
Through the ISB, I knew the head of the ‘LA Org’ and got us special treatment at their optimistically entitled ‘Celebrity Center’: no proselytizing by mail or phone and we could skip the tedious introductory ‘Communications Course’. We started ‘auditing’, paying $30 an hour for sessions in which you sat opposite an ‘auditor’ holding a pair of tin cans wired to an ‘E-Meter’, a primitive lie detector that measures galvanic skin resistance. Commands are designed to elicit memories that trigger ‘engrams: cellular records of incidents involving pain, loss, unconsciousness and a real or imagined threat to survival’. When a memory triggers an engram, the meter reacts. You go over the incident in your mind, without judgement, recalling its sights, smells, sounds and emotions until the needle ‘floats’, showing that the ‘charge’ has been erased through acceptance of the experience. The same incident can be called up a day later and provoke no reaction from the meter. The next command is ‘Recall an earlier similar incident’. You keep going in this vein until you can recall no ‘earlier similars’. I was surprised by how much I could remember from childhood years.
The theory makes sense. If, at age two, you fell on your head in a room with pale blue walls, chicken soup on the stove and Haydn on the stereo, your mood might well decline for no apparent reason if thirty years later you should encounter those same sounds, smells and sights. A ‘Clear’ is someone who has completed the first course of auditing and is deemed ready to graduate to higher ‘OT’ (‘Operating Thetan’, Scientology-speak for free spirit) levels. Once ‘clear’, you become able – in theory, at least – to respond to the present unfettered by the charged unconscious memories that weighed you down. You should become lighter, happier, more effective. And following some auditing sessions both Don and I had moments when we felt elated and energized.
But there was more to Scientology than auditing. Founder L. Ron Hubbard (known to everyone as LRH) had rules for everything. If Clears followed them, their efforts must, by definition, produce ‘up stats’ – Scientology jargon for success. When I asked about cases where rules were followed, but ‘stats’ were not ‘up’, I discovered the notion of ‘Suppressive Personalities’ and the obsession with past lives. An ‘SP’ is a Thetan who has suffered such a painful death in a previous lifetime that nothing will deter them from an agenda of vengeful destruction in the current one. When an organization run according to the thoughts of Chairman Ron fails, the inevitable SP within it must be isolated and expelled – a textbook example of self-justifying paranoia, circular logic and scapegoating.
When Clears spoke about ‘earlier similars’ taking them into past lives, they seemed always to have defied enormous odds by being Egyptians or princes or something colourful and romantic. An unsettling air of certainty pervaded the Celebrity Center: everyone had big plans – usually for show-business careers – and there was no possibility of failure. It sounded like a chapter from one of Hubbard’s bad sci-fi novels, but then it was easy to be sceptical in those pre-Tom Cruise and John Travolta days.
One weekend I hurt my neck body-surfing. Auditing cannot take place if you are suffering pain or discomfort so they sent me to a chiropractor. The waiting room was full of literature from the far-right John Birch Society; I decided the place was too unpleasant and left without treatment. I was summoned to the ‘Guardian’s Office’ to explain myself. When I proposed letting time heal the injury, they asked whether I had been associating with ‘persons hostile to Scientology’. I said that most people I knew were hostile to Scientology and I had no intention of cutting myself off from my friends. Robot-like, they repeated admonitory phrases from Hubbard’s texts. I left the center and never went back. Don had a similar run-in soon afterwards.
For recruits without our Hollywood salaries, hours spent hustling passers-by earned auditing credits. We met devotees who had been volunteering for years and had not yet earned as many hours as Don and I had purchased out of curiosity. The more time and effort invested, the less receptive people were to questions or doubts. I read
Barefaced Messiah
, which exposes Hubbard’s lies about his naval career and recounts his 1948 address to the Science Fiction Writers’ Convention in which he advises the delegates that if they really want to make money they should forget about science fiction and ‘start a religion’.
After this failed experiment, meetings with Mike Heron and Suzie Watson-Taylor were strained, but I stayed in touch with Suzie after they – and the group – broke up in the late ’70s. Suzie is a delightfully positive upper-middle-class girl, who adored Mike and had done a great job in difficult circumstances as ISB’s manager. She was sad she and Mike had not had children; she had a good job at Warner Brothers Records but was finding it hard to meet men who could understand her experiences or tolerate her devotion to LRH. In the early ’80s she was offered two jobs: one a promotion at Warners, the other a post at the Sea Org – Hubbard’s Florida headquarters. I urged her to take the record company job but she dropped me a line to say goodbye, she was off to Clearwater (LRH chose the site of his HQ for the name). I haven’t seen her since.
FREDDY WEINTRAUB’S OFFICE was my favourite stop on the executive floor at Warner Brothers Studios. Freddy is a New Yorker and, like me, was a refugee from the music business. His qualifications as production vice-president were two: he had brought the
Woodstock
film to Warner; and when Ted Ashley used to come to New York on business, Freddy got him laid. He had a full Isro, and sported the occasional dashiki. After my first Friday executive committee meeting, he invited me in for a chat. I was curious about John Calley, the erudite head of production. ‘Oh, he was a top producer,’ said Freddy, ‘he made
Ice
Station Zebra
.’
I had been reading up on the financial side of the film business. ‘
Ice Station Zebra
? Didn’t that lose more money than any film in history?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one!’ I didn’t get it. How did you go from producing an expensive flop to running a studio?
‘Joe, Joe, Joe! You have to understand Hollywood! Here, it’s not how much money you
make
, it’s how much money you
handle
!’
Freddy and I saw a lot of each other. There was a large editing room next to the Music Bungalow filled with film cans. Soon after I arrived, the young Martin Scorsese began opening those endless rolls of film in an effort to rescue a project known around the lot as ‘Freddy’s Folly’.
Its official title was
Medicine Ball Caravan
, a ‘high-concept’ documentary by French film-maker François Reichenbach, winner of an Oscar for a film about pianist Artur Rubinstein. He had been dazzled by
Easy Rider
and thrilled by Tom Wolfe’s
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. Out of the conjunction of these facts came a project: to film the Grateful Dead in Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster bus ‘Further’ driving across America and putting on concerts in out-ofthe-way places for the awestruck locals. If luck was on Reichenbach’s side, someone resembling one of the drooling killers in
Deliverance
would attempt to murder Jerry Garcia and Reichenbach would be there to film it. Freddy and Ted Ashley, in their wisdom, decided this would be the perfect sequel to
Woodstock
.
No sooner was the project green-lighted than problems began. Kesey wanted no part of it, and no, they couldn’t use his bus. The Grateful Dead were signed to Warner Brothers Records so they pretended to take it seriously for a while until – just as logistics and contracts were being finalized – they revealed how ludicrous they found the whole idea. In desperation, a yellow school bus was daubed with psychedelic designs and filled with a minor San Francisco band called Stoneground plus their girlfriends, hangers-on and dope dealers and they all set off to explore ‘fly-over land’, followed at a safe distance by the all-French crew. Joni Mitchell, the Youngbloods, BB King and Alice Cooper were booked to perform with Stoneground at such glamorous points in the American landscape as Gallup, New Mexico, Sioux City, Iowa, and Moline, Illinois, to give the film some star power.
The
Caravan
’s first night in the wilderness found everyone seated round a campfire in the Sierra Nevadas. The French cameramen were so beguiled by the hippy girls that they consumed whatever beverages they were offered. Soon they were all having their first LSD trips.
Warner Brothers had set ways of doing things. Each day, every foot of film shot for a Warner-financed film anywhere in the world was flown back to Burbank, developed, printed and screened for senior studio executives. When the first
Caravan
dailies arrived, heads were scratched and anxious (pre-mobile phone) messages left at hotel desks.
Much of the early footage consisted of lingering shots of leaves, children playing in mud, clouds drifting by and occasionally a face. Sound was rarely synched to film. Every time they turned around – breakfast eggs, a canteen of water on a hot day, cocoa before bedtime, the American beer they found so insipid – the Frenchmen were being dosed. The project started to come unglued. Freddy flew frantically back and forth from LA to obscure destinations in Nevada and Utah. He sent the Frenchmen packing and hired a more savvy American crew.
Medicine Ball Caravan
turned into a mundane rock concert film with some barely watchable
cinéma vérité
of hippies daubing face-paint on each other. Assaults by outraged Bible-thumpers failed to materialize.
Scorsese, who had met Weintraub in New York while working as an editor on
Woodstock
, struggled heroically to rescue the useless film, but to little effect. A sign of desperation was how important one synchronization licence became. Jesse Colin Young had written alternative lyrics to Merle Haggard’s classic ‘Okie From Muskogee’, a patriotic anti-hippy anthem. The Youngblood version was called ‘Hippy From Olema’ and mocked everything Merle felt was good and true and Umerkin. It fell to me to obtain permission for putting Haggard’s classic to this nefarious use.
The rights were controlled by the king of Bakersfield country music, Buck Owens. Buck is a genial huckster and a great singer who built an empire around
Hee-Haw
, a syndicated TV programme celebrating Okie culture and mocking Nashville’s Grand Ol’ Opry. Bakersfield C&W was jauntier and more ‘manly’ than the Nashville variety and much beloved of truck drivers. I had a pretty good collection of Buck Owens recordings at home myself and was ambivalent about my mission to hustle him. When I got him on the phone, I started off formally: ‘Hello, Mr Owens, this is Joe Boyd from Warner Brothers Films.’
‘Mr Owens’s ma
daddy
!
Buck
’s m’name,’ he bellowed back. The good ol’ boy routine was non-stop and quite charming. Nothing would give him greater pleasure, it seemed, than to accommodate the great Warner Brothers. And would I give his best regards to Mo Ostin, while I was at it? When he eventually decided not to grant the licence, he was discretion itself as he explained how
he
had no problem with it, but Merle’s mother would not be happy.
Scorsese, meanwhile, settled in among the Young Turks of Hollywood and started dating Freddy’s daughter. Albert Grossman’s former road manager Jonathan Taplin (who had looked after the Kweskins, Dylan and The Band) often visited Marty and me on the lot. His uncle ran a bank in Cleveland and he came up with the finance for
Mean
Streets
.
Medicine Ball Caravan
mercifully closed a week after it opened; there is, as yet, no sign of a DVD release with added footage. Karl Marx observed that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Anyone tracing the sixties through its music documentaries, from
Woodstock
to Altamont’s
Gimme Shelter
to
Medicine Ball Caravan
, might agree.
JIMI HENDRIX’S MOTHER was a jitterbug champion in Seattle during the Second World War. She married Al Hendrix the day before he shipped out with the merchant marine. By the time VJ Day arrived, she was used to the wild life; the marriage never worked and the kids stayed with Al. She would sneak in through the bedroom window on her way home from a bar to cuddle young Jimi, reeking of booze and cheap perfume and leaving before dawn. She died of TB at twenty-seven, the same age as her son when he took the fatal pills.