Cool Zon Media.
Hello, Hello, Hello, it's a message from your host, Margaret Kiljoy. That's a crass reference. It's the show about crass. I'm allowed to make crass references. That's the thing that I can do. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. Welcome to Cool People Who Did cool stuff. And it's a podcast. It's part two. You should figure that out by now. But I have to always ramble incoherently at the start of every episode until I introduce my guest, which this week is Julie Holland.
Hi.
How are you?
Hello, I'm fine. How are you doing.
I'm okay. We're recording this the same time as last time, so we're both actually dealing with ambient horror of the destruction of the little positive things that the government it did for people. But you know, it's okay. The sun will eat the earth eventually, anyway. That's what I always remind myself.
Yeah, yeah, I just grab all the coping mechanisms that work, you know, whenever I need them.
Yeah, that is, that is what they're there for. I'm gonna eat ice cream after this. That's my primary coping mechanism for real. Yeah, yeah, I eat vegan ice cream. As after when when times ago are hard, I eat ice cream.
It's great.
I have no regrets.
Sometimes you need this, like the blood sugar to your brain immediately.
Yeah. I feel like it's important that every podcast are of like at least some sort of terrible thing that they do to their body. But I like, basically don't do drugs or drink, so I hit upon sugar.
The thing that works absolutely the best for me is just working out. It's just it just.
That's the good version that makes you, that makes your life better.
Drinking doesn't do anything for me. I like mescal, but drinking doesn't. You know, it's not a coping mechanism. I tried that one time and I was like, oh, this doesn't do shit for me.
Yeah, drug stress me out and then you like worry about the police and stuff. I was terrible when I did. I never understood because like when I was like a street kid, I feel like I got searched by cops like three or four times a week, and so I just didn't understand how people did drugs. I was like, if you have drugs, you get caught. I don't understand.
And taxes. I was a street kid in taxes and we did rote atessin.
It's what they did in high school. But because I yeah, yes, it's legal. Yeah. Uh, the kids don't do drugs anyway, don't do drugs, yeah, don't whatever. So we're talking about punk, which has all kinds of opinions about drugs. Actually one
of the things that I didn't even get into. And some of the old West Coast punk scenes they literally had people already talking about like before straight edge people were like had critiques of how the hippies were dropping out and by using drugs they were like backly dulling their senses. They were making straight edge arguments in nineteen seventy seven on the West Coast. Yeah, and it was
just really interesting to me anyway. So in the US you have the reproletarianization of the middle class, right, more and more people are suddenly I mean, middle classes a lie anyway, Either you work for money or you don't. If you make money by owning things, then you are not working class. If you make money by working, you are working class. But the middle class is a conception that people come up with, and people were falling out
of it. But the UK's economy wasn't doing particularly better in nineteen seventy four, a successful minor strike brought down the Conservative government, which meant that labor was in charge when the economy fell apart and the country went to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. In the year nineteen seventy six, the country saw twenty three percent inflation. And I think we've talked about this a couple times
in the show before. If you get a loan from the International Monetary Fund, it's like going to a loan shark. But instead of like they're.
The devil, they're the devil. You're making a deal with the devil.
Yeah, instead of breaking your legs, they break the working class of your country's legs. And that same year there was a massive drought and a huge heat wave and everyone was told to cut their water use by half. It was so hot that the pavement was melting or tarmac as they call it over there. But what's funny is so that happens all the time now over there.
Yeah, that's just regular.
Yeah, unemployment had more than doubled as far as they can tell. The reason the economy of the UK fell so hard was basically that had been built on the blood of the colonies and the colonies had broken free. So the collapse of the empire fucked the UK good, I mean fuck them, but like.
It mostly fell on the working class, who's who was fault.
It was not right totally, but they still for a moment had kind of a strong social net until Thatcher in the eighties. And we'll talk about that. But like, while compared to the US, that still whatever.
Yeah, compared to the US there they're doing so much better. I was on tour and I needed to get some antibiotics.
And it just it blew my mind how easy it was over there.
Yeah, you know, at midnight, at midnight, I was like, oh, damn it, I have a ut.
This is a uti, you know, and we got a sorted. It was amazing.
I remember once staying with my friend in a French squat and she had fucked up her thumb and like pretty badly. She needed to go to the doctor. And I was like, God, what are you going to do? And she was like, I don't know. And then in the morning I talked to her and she was like, Oh, I'm French, I'm just going to go to the doctor. I'm not in America. Like even though I'm a broke squatter, I can get my thumb taken care of, you know.
It's so beautiful.
A lovely friend of mine got pregnant in Texas, moved to France. Yeah, and she had ended up having like a pretty complicated pregnancy and she had to stay a little bit longer in the birth center or whatever, in the hospital, whatever it was.
And on her way out, the French nurses were like, we're so sorry, we're going to have to you know, because you're American.
Nothing that's not all covered. I'm so sorry, we're going to have to ask you to cover this. It was twenty euros.
Yeah. So the UK it's not doing so well, but you know, everything's comparable to other things. The UK was having a moment too, where it was pondering something that it always seems to be pondering. It was pondering should we become even more racist? In nineteen seventy six. You ever seen Eric Clapton's racist tirade from nineteen seventy six.
No, that's hilarious. I think I heard a more recent one.
No's he's for someone who built his career off off like very not subtle shade of blackface. That man has some fucking golf.
Yeah. In nineteen seventy six, the famous guitarist Eric Clapton went on stage and gave this massive fucking racist rant that I will not and cannot read on air, full of old timey slurs telling foreigners to leave the country. He starts it off with by being like, hey, do I have any foreigners in the crowd? Raise your hands, get out of here. And then he goes on and in this he says, quote, I used to be into dope. Now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. And then
he shouted keep Britain white. This was not subtle.
That is incredibly unsubtle.
Good for him, yeah, something like in twenty eighteen he finally he apologized for saying half racist stuff. And I'm like, you literally said I'm into racism. That's not half that's the whole thing, that's all of racism. When you say I am into racism, they.
Love caging and pretending something's a joke, like I don't.
Know, yeah yeah. And this is literally the reason that the social movement and like concert movement Rock against Racism started in the UK was in response to Eric Clapton being a massive bigot eventually passed that torch on to Morrissey, as we all know, but he started Yeah, that broke my heart. I know that one. That one fucked me up.
I saw him kind of recently, just just by chance, because he was at like a festival. He was so good. I wanted to come back.
I believe he's a good musician, but a good songwriter.
He was.
It was glorious. He sounded amazing. I want him to like go to some rehab or something.
I want to racism rehab, racism rehab, I think because he said it takes courage to be gentle and kind, come on, which just means he's a coward. Yep, he does not have the courage to be gentle and kind. He's a massive bigot. And if I was in the UK, you could sue me, but I'm not. I'm in the US anyway. So England was having a moment. They were
really going through some stuff. When the sex Pistols came on to one of the three TV channels in England in nineteen seventy six and were goaded into saying the word shit shyly. This was a huge, huge deal. I expected this to be like when Rage against the machine like went on BBC and like, uh, played fuck you. I won't do what you tell me without censoring it, you know, yeah, which is a brilliant moment in music history.
But literally, they like kind of said something under their breath and the guy was like, wait, what did you say? And he was like, oh, I said something I can't say. And the guy's like, no, what did you say? And he's like oh shit, and they're like ah back in the seventy something seventy six, yeah, and then punk was everywhere. This was the best pr move they could have possibly made. Although they almost went to jail. I think I don't know enough about sex pesscical history. I don't care enough
about them. This it blew up. But as a mainstream fad, by nineteen seventy eight, Punk's moment in the sun had passed. New Wave was in, except there were now scores of punks and they weren't going to move on. They were going to build a worldwide scene and they were going to build it more DIY, a bit more underground. But you can't even truly I mean you're talking about millions and millions of records. It's just not on TV to the same degree after nineteen seventy eight to cut over
to Canada for a second. As author and eco terrorist Anne Hanson put in her book direct Action Memoirs of an Urban Gorilla, she wrote, quote, the parents of the punk kids were wooed into complacency through slick marketing of the illusion that corporate America was moving towards a society free of pollution, with equal opportunities for all. Both men and women could drive to their corporate offices and their BMW's listening to the sounds of Bob Dylan or the
Rolling Stones. At school, the punk kids were pushed to make decisions about their future careers by the age of twelve so that they could end up in the right stream that would lead to well paid jobs for the privileged few who could afford to go to university. And that didn't happen. So that's what punk was the response to. And instead these kids disappeared into DIY spaces and they built a vibrant and chaotic scene. The dancing and early punk was dead simple. If nothing else, you just pogo.
You just jump up and down in time to the music, or not in time to the music, as I usually did. Stage diving was a staple of early shows in particular, which is essentially a trustful you climb up onto the stage, breaking the rules of the venue and the barrier between band and audience, and then jump into the crowd, trusting
that strangers will catch you. The previous generation had had these huge stadium rock bands with their finely tuned sound, with millionaire rock stars who were further and further from any working classroots that they might have come from. Some of them still sang about revolution, but it was hard to believe them. With punk, anyone can make a band,
anyone can make a fanzine. A fanzine called Strangled put out a cover that showed how to play three chords, with the caption here's three chords, Now form a band.
That's great.
That's so good.
Yeah, that's great.
I always remember the the Beatles talking about walking across town to find somebody who knew another knew how to play another chord.
I love like even more than punk music. I love punk, the punk ethos, and I love the idea that like you can go to a show and listen to your friends who suck and have an amazing time, and you can go to a show and listen to your friends
who are amazing and have an amazing time. And your friends who are amazing might break out of that local scene and play nationally, or they might break bigger than that and play internationally or signed to a label or whatever the hell, right, But that doesn't make them better than the band that sucks it. Just well, it makes their music better, but it doesn't make them like as
people better, and it doesn't even necessarily make it. You're still gonna have an amazing time at like a basement punk show, you know, I mean, or you're gonna have a terrible time, depending on punk is not perfect. But like, I don't know, I love that about punk. I love that And it's actually funny because it's like people complain all the time about how everyone has podcasts, and I sometimes complain all the time about how everyone has podcasts.
I mostly complain about how I have a lot of podcasts. But I lovets, Oh thank you. But I love that anyone can start a podcast, I you know, like I love that it it's it's it's zines. It reminds me of zines as a culture thing, you know.
Yeah, it's a radio zine.
Yeah, And some people are listened to by ten people, and some people are listening by ten million people and whatever. You know, that's cool.
It's a little de democratic.
Yeah, And if you get enough listeners, dear listener, on your podcast, here's three chords. Start a podcast, you might end up one day pivoting to ads. Thank you, thank you. That's why I get paid at all. And we're back. So you have these bands that you know, sex Pistols is running around saying anarchy in the UK. You have enough people run around saying anarchy in the UK long enough, and suddenly you're going to find people who mean it. Suddenly the anarchists are going to come onto the scene
in a major way. And if you want to be cynical about it, to spoil next week's content, you guys sort of this pissing contest who's like the most authentic versus everyone else who's like a poser or sellout or whatever. But we're not going to focus on the bad elements of punk just yet. And no one epitomized living true to your values more than the band Crass, at least
at first. They are the band that spearheaded this particular wave of anarcho punk and in order to talk about crass, we have to talk about the fact that they're all a bunch of hippies, which is like one of my favorite things about them, well, most of them. One of them was a young punk.
How are we defining hippie in this sense?
I will tell you, and I believe you're gonna believe me. Well, they wouldn't have called themselves hipies. They would have called themselves freaks. I love that they're like from the movement that would be called by a mainstream person like hippies, but amongst themselves they identified as freaks. God, all that kind of stuff gets so complicated. Like I remember, like trying to explain to someone the difference between a krusty and a crustpunk.
You know, yeah, yeah, exactly. I always remember this comic.
I forget what it was who drew it, but there was this, uh, somebody's calling this woman a hippie and she ended up doing something real tough at the end, and she's like, I told you, I'm not a hippie.
Hippies are nice.
And what's really funny is that like Crafts are pacifists, but they're angry about it. I wouldn't even know I call them nice. So yeah, like I like.
Freak, that's that's uh, that's useful.
I mean coming from Houston and being out and queer since I was thirteen, like I fully you know, experienced.
The other ring.
Yeah, and like how it was so funny, like how easy it was to be a freak growing up in Houston in the eighties.
Yeah.
No, I I I think it's kind of fun to have these like labels that are non labels like queer, you know, like freak. Kind of feels like it could be that where you're like, I don't know whatever, there's lots of different things. I'm not pinning it down for you figured it out yourself.
Yeah, it's a very it's a very big banner.
Yeah. And so we're going to start with two of the folks behind Crass, a man named Penny Rimbo and a woman named jeev Ousher. Geev Ousher was born in London. She was the youngest of four children in a working class family. Her older brother died at age twelve when I think she was four. Her dad cleaned out chemical boilers at the Ford Factory and did not live to be old because that's not a good way to live. To be old.
It's a terrifying job.
Yeah. Her mom made sure that they still got to go on holiday every year, but that meant they took a car three miles down the road. When she was sixteen or so, she went off to art school, the South East Essex Technical College and School of Art. It's a trade school primarily most of the students are in the trades like welders and shit. But they have an art school.
There too, so like probably commercial art.
Yep, exactly, that's the next line. It focused on commercial art, graphic design, illustration, that kind of thing, and not like art for art's sake or avant garde and not.
Like high art.
Yeah, she was one of only two working class people in the place, and she put her nose to the grindstone and worked her ass off while her more middle class and upper middle class peers were more willing to just kind of fuck around. One of those people who was willing to kind of just fuck around because he was from a more middle class or upper middle class background, was a man who named himself Penny Rimbo. Penny is a girl's name in England, and I think that's worth knowing.
And I love when men take on women's names because I did it for a decade before I came out as trans. And also there's like a weird, just long history of musicians doing that. The two of them, they were more into the artsy shit than the commercial shit, and they became friends and they fell in love. G was a beat who dressed like a tomboy, but with stockings and short skirt. This is the early sixties. Penny, meanwhile, wore a combat jacket and Chelsea boots, which are those
boots that rural lesbians wear. That's like my identification with Chelsea boots, you know, like if you're like, oh, those boots that every queer person I know who lives in the country whars those. Penny had been born outside of London in nineteen forty three to a upper middle class family. His father fought in the war World War II as an engineer, blowing up and rebuilding bridges across Europe and Africa, and then wound up working for the World Bank, which
is not a good way to be ethical. Penny has dedicated his life to being a class trader, though an awful lot has been written, and I've read an awful lot about how class affects his politics a lot of people. The fact that he's middle class is used against the band Crass constantly, even though many of the members, including the kind of primary singer, was working class. Whatever. He rejected wealth from a young age. He wrote once quote, ever since I was a kid, I thought that whatever
I got, i'd share. What else can you do? I don't really believe you can change governments, but you can change your immediate environment. You can live a life of sharing and giving and taking. His first political campaign was the campaign for nuclear disarmament, And it seems like he was always very concerned about authenticity right from the start.
He's like kind of the main it seems like the one who's just like no, anything that is not true to our values in the following specific way is you know, like he was into the Beatles for a while, but then he was annoyed at them for selling out. And at one point while he was in school, for anyone who can't see Jolie's making a like yeah whatever, yeah.
It's like how how are what does that even mean?
They had like all those screaming girls, like they couldn't even they couldn't even play music.
After a while, like how how could they not sell out?
Yeah, like the whole discourse around selling out. We're gonna talk to you about it more when we started talking about like how Cress kind of developed what they developed into, which I actually I mean I still like crass, but like I don't give a shit about the conceptions of nineteen seventies like UK punks about what counts the selling out.
Yeah, it's just funny.
I mean the idea that the Beatles were not sold out from the beginning is also really funny.
I mean they kind of went.
The other way. They moved toward they tried to move toward art.
Yeah, they got artsy, Yeah, totally. At one point while it was in school, he won a contest to make pop art for the Beatles. But then he didn't let the Beatles sign his painting because he didn't want them scribbling all over his art. And that's classy, sang.
Yeah, that's that's really having a backbone right there.
Yeah. G was maybe the more directly political of the pair of them in terms of like being concerned not just in like ethical values, but like political campaigns. She was radicalized at school. She got really involved after the Aberfan disaster in nineteen six sixty six. In October, a slag heap from a coal mine slid into a Welsh village, killing one hundred and forty four people, mostly children between seven and ten years old. Because it crushed some schools.
Oh so sad.
Yeah, and it the whole thing had been preventable. People knew that it was going to happen. And I've, like I live in West Virginia, I've like had some hand in like some of the coal mining protests and stuff around here, and like the same kind of stuff happens, Like the stuff from coal mining just gets like stuffed wherever they can, and they do it as cheaply as possible, and then the dam's break and then it kills people
because they don't care about poor people. And that's probably going to be a shocker to the listeners this podcast. And after they got out of school, g goes off to the Royal College of Art but was rejected from it, so she starts working at an art center so that kids can come and learn art if their schools didn't
offer it. Penny meanwhile as an art teacher too, working at a continuing education center, and feminism was always on their minds, I actually would say that, like their commitment to feminism and pacifism is like more actual part of their politics than like anarchism specifically.
I feel like my scene of friends that loved Crass were politicized.
By them and in a really beautiful way.
And I wish that that group of people had taken the feminism a little bit more to heart.
That is an ongoing thing for Crass with their fans, because like, pretty fairly shortly along in the band, there's like multiple women in the band and they have like women are singing actively feminist songs, and then some of the men start writing and singing feminist songs about like how masculinity is defined and how we need to betray it and like all this stuff, and they would still just be like, Yep, our fans will sing along and don't do anything about it.
But so Ghost, it's hard. It's hard. Feminism is hard.
Yeah, And G wanted to prioritize her independence, so after college they both started renting rural places about ten minutes away from they just like lived near each other instead of moving in together. Right, she was like, well, I need to be my own person.
I love that.
Yeah, And after a couple of years, and this makes sense to me, you know. After a couple of years, g moved in with Penny in the place that is now legendary, a place called dial House. And when I say legendary, I mean to a very small subsection of people, but it used to be a large subsection of people. An hour outside of London, there's a town called Epping. Outside of Epping, there's a village called north Weald. Outside
north Wild there is a cottage called dial House. UK addresses are funny because a lot of the houses of names. I used to laugh every time i'd send a package to England when I did distro, because I'd be addressing it to like Icicle manor third Rock past the Lane in Merlinshire or whatever. Fully, and I told this to my UK friend and she pointed out that every American address is one nine, three, two, one four, five six
seventy fourth Street B. She got her ass. Dial House was first built in the fourteen hundreds, speaking of just like I mean, just I don't know whatever. It was built in the fourteen hundreds and slowly expanded over the centuries, but it had been derelict for a long time. When Penny moved in. When I first heard about dial house, I just literally assumed that he was like a trust fund kid and his parents had bought him a house when he got out of school. You know, Yeah, this
is not what happened. He actually worked and for many, many years, I think for decades they rented the place. It had been derelict for years, and when Penny moved in, it had just been used by like local kids for parties. Before then, the place was at the end of a dirt road, and instead of pain rent for the first several months or years or something, he fixed the place up. At first, it wasn't anything particularly radical, just a strange little place that he lived alongside eventually two of his
coworkers from where he taught at that school. But in nineteen seventy he quit that job and he wanted to do something more radical with the place. He wanted to build an open house. Later, he explained his dream like this quote. I love the idea of somewhere where people could stop to tell their story, with a comfortable bed for the night, and go on their journey. My original dream was that if I created one of those, then everyone who visited would go off and do something similar.
Dial house gets called commune, or it gets called an arts community. He gets called a lot of things. It's an interesting model. Multiple things I've read said, like the dishes are usually clean there. I think people had to do their own dishes. The food was communal more or less. Anyone who wanted to come over could go into any room they wanted that wasn't a private bedroom. If you
wanted food, you'd cook it, probably for everybody. So it's basically somewhere between a collective house, a commune, and a crash pad. And it's like not trash like a crash pad. It's not like everything for everyone totally all the time. No bedrooms like people assume communes are just seems nice.
I wonder about the tradition of that kind of stuff in Europe and the UK, like like the like the idea of a pub is super interesting, and that a pub is a public house.
Yeah, you know, and I and I love learning about like and this is why I was reading Calvin and the Witch or this is what I was looking for in Calvin and the Witch. Is a history of the heretical movements, and a lot of them had these communal situations too.
Yeah, and like these big like the begines, Okay.
Like little little rumors that I've heard about them, these like collectivist traditions.
Yeah, so I wonder. I wonder where that came from.
For them, I wonder too, And I I think it's like a I think it's developed from hippie culture, but I'm not one hundred percent certain, but it is a kind of interesting spin on it, and I like the yeah, the comparison, like the public house kind of thing. His two roommates were like, well, I don't want to do that. I want to be able to write my name on my food. And so they moved out, and other folks moved in, supposedly without no one was like particularly upset
by this one resident. His name is Dave King. Later he drew the crass logo, which if people haven't seen, it's worth seeing. Is not a visual medium. But honestly, I think the reason that Grass was successful is this logo. Like, I mean, they're a good band. Well, no, they're an interesting band, but they like they were branded really well, and the crass logo is a very successful and dramatic
piece of symbolism. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Dave King said about the place, quote, what was very interesting to me was the atmosphere of timelessness that seemed to exist around the house. Seemed like the days could last forever, and being young, you maybe also stay up all night. There was a certain benign drift that would happen that
I think is the potential source of mystical experiences. Essentially, he was saying that, like, even without drugs, there was a kind of altered reality experience of like leaving the city.
That's yeah, that's beautiful.
That reminds me of some of my friends' houses and some of my experiences of collective houses like that.
It does have this feeling of being out of time. Yeah, yeah. Defining the sense of out of time is, uh, how do you do that too? Does it remind you of fairy tale? Like? What does what does that mean?
It makes me think literally of like the concept of the land of fairy where time passes differently, years and years go by when you just spend one night in Faerry or the other way around. You know, like the idea that like you go to this other place and time just works differently. And I've experienced that basically in places kind of like this myself too in it. I love it.
That's beautiful. I want to. I want to. I want the campfire ghost story version of that.
Yeah. And in Dial House, one room became a music room, and soon enough people started making weird avant garde shit. The Dial House folks were part of this movement called Fluxus, which I am not an expert on. This is not an episode on Fluxus, but this is basically the avant garde movement. It is heavily inspired by our man, the gay anarchist John Cage. It's into making events rather than finished pieces. It's generally anti commercial. Sometimes it's like people
kind of call it neo data. Yoko Ono is probably the most famous practitioner of this stuff today. And I was going to give a weird tangent about the time I ask you a question, but I'm not gonna do it. Ah that okay, wait, no, I should probably do Okay, So here's my weird tangent. So, when you were like a teenager, you went and saw the the John Cage exhibit, you know?
Yeah?
Yeah, when I was sixteen, I saw Yoko on a exhibit and I was not impressed. I was like, because it didn't to me, it didn't have much Like I was really into craft at the time, right, I was like, because I didn't know what I wanted to say as an artist, but I like really was like interested in like people like learning the craft really well.
And yeah, like where's the chain mail?
Oh, I mean like I mean like the like although that would have interested me definitely. I was definitely making chain oil at that point, but like, I mean the like technical expertise and shit, you know, yes. And on the wall there was like forty pictures of this blurry it's the same blurry photo of an eye, and then under each one it said like I remember this, and it was like different memories related to eyes, and the very first one said I remember when I was born
and looking up into the doctor's eyes. And I thought to myself, yoko on as a liar, yoko and as a fraud. Fuck this right, so rude?
Teenagers are so rude.
I was like, there's no way this lady remembers being born. To hell with this, all of this is bullshit. That was what I walked away with. The person I went with was not impressed about my take on this. And then I was in arts school a couple of years later and Yoko Ono came and gave a talk, and
I like waited in line to ask a question. I was like a young anarchist, and so everyone in the crowd is like, ah, fuck, this bitch is gonna ask some like fucking like shit about the World Trade Organization or something, you know, And I get up and I think I got her. I'm like, Yoko Ono, do you remember being born? Because in my mind, if she says yes, then she's lying, and if she says no, then she's lying, right, yeah, And Yoko Ono says, oh, that's such an interesting question.
My first memories are reoccurring dreams of being born and looking into the doctor's eyes. And I was like, oh, fuck, yok Ona's legit. I'm an asshole.
You are an asshole. That's real, sweet before you go.
But I didn't. I didn't be like do you remember being born?
You know?
I was just just like, hey, what what's up?
You know?
And so yeah, that was how I got convinced that the art is real. Everything's fine, and so fluxus is the super arty stuff that drives the right wing mad. And also it didn't impress sixteen year old me. But now I think is really cool, and honestly, like some of the fluxus type stuff, it doesn't really impress me personally, or it's not it's not what I go for personally, but I I respect the shit out of it, and I love how much it triggers chuds, you know, and
some of it creates incredible, amazing things. So I'm not whatever anyway, I swear I'm not a total philistine, just
a slightly one. Now dial House the run a weird art people in their weird hippie house and four of them start an arty noise band called the Stanford Rivers Quartet with percussion, piano, keyboards, and flute and trombone, and they would do artsy shit that's really cool, honestly, like develop new styles of musical notation that were like visual art, and so if you paint with red lines and that it's up to the reader the musician to decide what the red means in terms of how they should inflect
the notes as they play them and stuff like that. Rad Yeah, no, I genuinely think it's kind of cool. And then they had an avant garde band called Exit after that, and this one lasted longer and it was a free jazz avant garde band and they named themselves after quote the direction they expected the audience to head in droves.
That is one marker of the success of a band for sure. My friend Stephan Jikusco, he that was one of his markers and he's he's the main brains behind the Doughnut band that I referenced previous episode. Yeah, he yeah stuff And to Cusco, what a genius. I love that man. Yeah, and he's got his stuff on band camp that I would love to direct people to. The like noisy art stuff I was involved in to some degree as a child.
And I remember like when I like when I started watching like art films and stuff. For a while, I was like, I don't really get it, like not even just like like experimental and abstract film. And then I realized, I was like, oh, the way I zone out to this stuff is different, and it kind of creates an altered like an altered reality experience. And then I was like, oh, that's the point. It's not just a narrative or whatever.
Yeah, that is the point. And I personally hate dissociating, so I have to. I have to. I want more exciting experimental music. I can't. I can't deal.
With the like long, long, long, long, empty sort of like extremely slow shot kind of stuff.
But one of my favorite ways that I've heard a lovely experimental musician describe the point of his work is that he considers himself a collaborator with nature. Yeah, and that's how he thinks about generating sound.
That makes sense. When they created Exit, there's a few core members and anyone could come and go from the band, so I like they're collaborating into the space they're in. The audience when they play can come up on stage and join them. Often they start with like eight musicians and end up with eighteen musicians. And they played a lot of shows, especially like festival and weird art places for weird art crowds, and at shows they would hand out presents, art prints, packets of seeds as long as
the audience gets something. They never charge admission, I believe once. And they always started an hour early before the set time on the which is this is where they this is how they punks learn from this to punk, we should need to put the punctual back in punk or something. They would start an hour early so that by the time the audience came in. They came into quote a musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence, so like the things already happening.
Ooh, that's so beautiful that I know.
And then they would play until they felt like stopping or the venue turned off the power. In nineteen seventy two, they threw an avant garde festival called Ices International Carnival of Experimental Sound, which was about two weeks long. Penny said about it, quote the great end not so great avant gardis worldwide came to it and performed mostly for nothing. Financially. It was a disaster, but it was a fantastic festival, really lovely. John Cage played at it, and one of
the people who helped put it on. This is a complete side note. I just can't not put this in.
A guy named Harvey Matso was a former FBI informant who testified before the House of un American Activities like he was like a communist who had turned on all of his friends until they found out he was actually an FBI informant the whole time, until he turned on the FBI, and he he turned trader and he helped bring down McCarthy and spent three years in prison, and then he moved to the UK because both in the US, both the like left wing people and the right wing
people hated him and he just needed to get out.
Yeah, but we need to make room for people to come back. I don't know. It's hard to trust. It's hard to trust a turncoats.
But yeah, I know, I know you're like, I would hold this man at arm's length, thank him for what he did, be mad at him for other stuff he did. It's complicated, but then he helped organize this thing, so I love it. But Exit didn't last too much longer. And why it disbanded. Okay, so it disbanded in nineteen seventy two also, and it disbanded for kind of a cool reason. Penny realized that he was being seen as
a guru. A lot of his students were joining the band, and he would often like take his students out to the woods to like make art by just building little houses for the fairies out of sticks or whatever, you know, And he was like, I want to keep teaching, I want to keep making music, but I'm not trying to be a fucking cult leader. Like I'm not trying to be weird about it.
Yeah, so many cool bands from that time ended up getting really culty, Like the Amazing String Band got super.
Cool, Okay, I believe it, Like yeah, they went scientologist.
Oh fuck, And so I just like really appreciate that. He was like, no, I'm too anti Thiritearian for this, Like I'm not. That's not what I'm doing here, you know.
It's dumb. Yeah, that was the That was the real season of CULTI bullshit. Yeah, I mean not that we're fully.
Out of that, but uh, everything old is new again.
I was those collective trance people were hard into.
Yeah, yeah, I you know, you see how like stepping outside of mainstream society is very appealing for very good reasons, and that can absolutely get culty. You know, when you asked earlier if I was certain air hippies, I'm going to describe to you this next chunk of their life. Dial House kept going and a young man named Wally Hope started hanging around Penny Rimbau and a few other
people swore that he could do magic. Like one summer day he said, hey, guys, check this out, and suddenly it started snowing and there's like multiple people saying that this happened, and other people are like, no, that didn't happen. Not who were there that day that I'm aware of.
People in Crass have different opinions about this guy. He was a trust fund dropout and he had visions about an egalitarian society of sun worshippers who would live at Stonehenge, and it was going to start on Summer Solstice nineteen seventy four. They were going to go and squat Stonehenge by having a music festival. Is how I know they're hippies?
Oh real, Yeah.
The poster read free Stonehenge off rocks off every Sunday forever. And then because they're like chill, they wrote all the people living near Stonehenge to give them a heads up that they were all about to move there and like become weird squatters on the land and so but here's the letter that they sent. I'm going to read the whole thing because I love it. On the road home,
there's random capitalization on the road home. Sunday, Dear sir, with all well meaning respect, our Lord God and his son Jesus Christ have ordained a spiritual pilgrimage to Stonehenge on twentieth June twenty first, et cetera. To fulfill the two commandments, Love God, love your neighbor. You are and will be our neighbor. We beg for help, friendship, and trust. If the gathering is overflowing big, we will give you
any help you need, but you might us respect. We are to God's law and trying to balance the violence, corruption ensuing Third World War, oily energy crisis to manual communal farming, love, peace and freedom, your best mate, Wally, help for the kids?
X my goodness, Yeah, how's that going to go over? Till? These like rural I don't know country people out there.
So I don't know as much about what the actual farmers made of this, but I do know what happened. More broadly, a few hundred people showed up the UK's first synth duo Zorch was the only band that played Oh my God, and some folks stuck around for a
while after the festival and squatted. Their goal was to lasten to a winter solstice, and everyone who was there changed their name to like Wally something that's not Culty, No, not at all, and then they basically just like a journalist was there and was like, look, they all just like sat around and ate terrible food that they didn't know how to cook, and they did drugs, and they talked about lay lines and pyramids, and they were eventually
arrested and kicked out. The journalist was not impressed. Dear listener, I am not either, but whatever, more power to them. Likewise, Wally, the original Wally, decided that there should be another one
of these festivals. But he was arrested at a squat for possession of LSD, and then when he took him to the prison, he refused to wear the prison uniform because they said it gave him a rash, so they threw him into a mental hospital where they told him that he was schizophrenic and they locked him up for a while. The second festival actually happened without him. They actually kept happening until they were shut down violently in nineteen eighty five. Thousands of people came there and there
were two stages. Joe Strummer, later of the Clash, played with a band called the one oh one Ers and Dial House. People honestly didn't really think much of the festival. They were annoyed at the rich hippies pretending to be Native Americans and like living in tepees and real and on from stage called Penny and undercover cop. I think because he like didn't look enough like a hippie or whatever, you know, while he was too in custody to attend the second festival, and he never saw the ones that
came after it either, because he died. It was ruled as suicide, and it was probably suicide in its way, but Penny was convinced for years that he'd been murdered, not just done in by the horrors of nineteen seventies met mental institutions, but straight up murdered and covered up by the police. Penny was kind of having a rough time around then. This would be the Long Dark Night
of the Soul moment in the movie. Gee had just moved to New York and they broke up and they actually I think this is really sweet and pretty feminist. They had a divorce even though they didn't get married. Wow, and they're like gonna be friends and co collaborators to this day, Like they're both still alive. If you're listening, I hope I did this right, and I'm sure I didn't.
There's so much written about you all. There's so much. Anyway, Penny was drinking heavily and a lot of his like peaceful hippie outlook was getting replaced by the fear of repression by the state because he was like, they just killed my friend, right, and he was investigating his friend's death, and the cops would tell him like hey, They would like pop by and be like, hey, you need to stop.
You need to stop investigating this death. And so he wrote a whole book with all of his evidence called Homage to Catatonia, which is a sick pun on the Homage to Catalonia. Absolutely, he later burned it. It was never published that I can tell. There's multiple other people who have used this title for other things over the years. But and then another Wally, like another person from the
Stonehenge encampment, was murdered, probably by like local rednecks. Basically he was tied to a tree with a joint in his hand. It was like an anti hippie murder. Probably. Yeah, these days, Penny is less sure that the original Wally was murdered directly so much as killed by the heart of the medical system.
It's really creepy that the cops kept coming around and saying stop looking look into this. I mean, that's those are red flags right there.
I know absolutely, you know. And when I say he's less short, I mean he's less short, not he is short, you know, like just it's a to many people, it's an open question. But in some ways an arcopunk was born from the innocence of the hippies being bashed up against the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems, and they saw themselves as a response to the failure of the hippie movement to fundamentally change society. Dialhouse started
realizing society wasn't changing. Things were getting worse. Penny Rimbo, in his book The Last of the Hippies wrote, Oh, that's the other reason I can call him a hippie. He wrote, Society, the state in the system hadn't fucked off. They'd not only stayed right they were they'd grown stronger. Slowly, as people woke up to the fact that turning on was turning off and dropping out was copying out, the horrific reality of the nuclear world forced its way back
through the escapist blur of those psychedelic dreams. The dream had been that if you created your own life independent of the system, the system would leave you to it. Looking back on it now, it seems pathetically naive, but for maybe fifteen years it had sustained the lives of thousands of people. The ultimate failure of the hippie was exactly the ostrich like approach to life. A hippie utopia surrounded by a world of hate and war was like snow before the summer sun.
Yeah.
I mean I always think about how mindfulness was used by the Japanese military.
Yeah. I have like conversations a lot with one of my therapist friends about, like, I love cognitive behavioral therapy and the ability to brainwash yourself like gotten me it's it's probably saved my life. But my therapist friend, a different one than the one you taught me cognit behavioral therapy was like, but it gets used to get people to accept things that they shouldn't accept.
Yeah, as a tool.
Yeah. And Penny also wrote quote, I think people like Jagger and Bowie stole our hopes and turned them into money. Their castles are built on our money, the movement's money. Bowie could have done something, but he didn't do anything.
I'm friends with somebody who played drums with Bowie.
For years. Oh shit, And he said like that man was obsessed with money, and I thought, I think to myself, like, all right, you're lucky.
You're a drummer. You get paid as a band leader. This is my defense of Bowie.
In that moment. I was like, you have to be yes, yeah, it is hard to pay a band and be on the road, and it's like one of the most expensive small businesses you can run is a band. Yeah, but I appreciate what he's saying about Bowie collectively. Is is that like in response and you know, in relation to the collective dreams. It's like this man wove some beautiful spells that a lot of people responded to. But yeah, I think he's just an artist.
Yeah.
No.
And it's funny because like if you read different people in Crass talking about Bowie, Penny fucking hates Bowie, right, but like Steve Ignorant is like, oh no, yeah, I really like Bowie, like you know, did a lot for like being able to dress up like a freak. And you know, it's like and you just have like people have different thoughts about him, but the thing you're saying about like yeah, like yeah, as a band leader, you have to be obsessed with money. Someone needs to make
sure that people get paid. And I think, what's so funny.
We'll probably talk about this more like in future episodes too, but like, you know, you have this like, oh, we're all going to become rock stars and become millionaires off the back of everyone who buys their stuff, and then you have this reaction and an arcopunk is absolutely reaction, and they're like, we won't get rich, you know they do, Like I think that they're like eating some food, right, but they are like really sticking to their guns about
keeping their products cheap, their shows, like you know they are.
They stay earnest their entire lives to this, right, And then so you end up with this like in order to be an activist you have to volunteer for it kind of attitude for decades and in the past like ten fifteen years, that's starting to break and people are starting to as what we were saying earlier, being these two ideas can be in conversation with each other, Right, Yeah, you have your initial idea, fuck ya get rich, and then you have your other idea like, no, you must
live like a monk to have good politics. And then also in a society with good social services, and then you have people being like, oh, that critique is really valid, but I need to get paid in order to do this. You know.
Yeah, it's a job. It's a really hard job.
Yeah yeah, and most people need jobs. But what did we're actually at the end of this episode what they do instead of being hippies forever. You already know, they become crass and they change the world. But how exactly it happens we're going to talk about next week. But first we're going to talk about how people can support you with your job of making music or just listen to the music, or do whatever else you want people to do besides starting a cult. You're not allowed to start a cult.
No, I don't. I was raised in a cult. That's why I was a homeless teenager.
Oh okay, cool, I was.
Yeah, I was brought up in a stupid fundamentalist religious group and that's why I was on the street. But my shop is open whenever I'm not on tour, and that's a Jollihand music dot com or come see me.
On tour a touring anytime soon.
I'm mostly playing private shows up the West Coast and then I have a show March sixth in Bellingham at the odd Fellows, and I'm playing Chicago at Constellation on March fifteenth, so y'all come see me. Oh yeah, I'm going to play. I'm going to play with my friend's health and Beauty in Chicago. It's going to be great.
And if people want Julie's merch, it is beautiful. Like I don't frame every random show or music related thing that I get, and.
I'm so honored, thank you. And that illustration is by Jack Follows, who's a really gorgeous non binary anarchist game designer who you should follow on Patreon.
Hell yeah, and uh, for my own plugs, I already plugged that. I have a book. It's a book. It's called The Immortal Choir holds every voice. And I also have a substack, and all the important posts are free, and all of the posts that are more personal, some of the posts that are more personal or behind a paywall, and you can follow me there on whatever level of free or not free you feel like. And also, I don't know, times are hard, but we can take care
of each other. That's my plug, take care of each other. We're gonna mostly get through this, most of us, and that's the way it always is going to be, because none of us were getting out of this is a live thing. When you're alive, you're guaranteed to die. That's what keeps me happy. Why am I rambling? I need to go eat food, but I will see you all next week.
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