The Bopper Brigade

The Cool Tycoon: A $250,000 underground epic film is about to be shot in Greenwich Village. Hundreds of klieg lights attached to the great arch cast eerie shadows in the fountain. Microphones hang from the trees. Electrical cables leading from huge generators crisscross the pavement. Over 200 paid extras, dressed in authentic Visigothic armor, fill the benches. One hundred union technicians respond to commands shouted by Andy Anger, the 16-year-old director, through his megaphone. He is standing atop an enormous crane that is dollying into position. Attached to the top of the crane is a tiny, battered pre-War 8mm movie camera.

"Quiet on the set--we're about to shoot," orders the director.

The scene starts. The superstar of the underground. Baby Jane Sedgwick, dressed in a Red Guard cap and jacket, is being chased by a menacing, misshapen pygmy wearing a rubber L. B. J. mask. He catches her under the arch, tears off all her clothes and has her for a full five minutes right before the camera, which is pointed directly at her left big toe.

"Cut!"

The director slides down the 100-foot crane to where Jerry Malingerer, his boy Friday, has his silver-lamé director's chair. The word Guru is embroidered on the back.

The film's middle-aged financial backer diffidently approaches the director. "I don't want to interrupt the flow of your creative juices, Andy, baby, but how come you're using all this expensive Hollywood equipment, but only that tiny little camera?"

"It is only through the enigmatic four-dollar narrow-gauge camera that one can approach the Jerry Lewis tragicomic symbolic glaucoma."

"How come there is no lens in the camera?"

"I don't ever want the intrusive lensic quality to stultify the natural existential spontaneity of the filmic medium."

The backer, with mounting trepidation, asks, "But can you see anything when you project it on the screen?"

"Screen? We don't use such a symbol of Hollywood's vulgar commercialism as a screen. We use a psychedelic silk shower curtain. What you see on the curtain doesn't count. What's important is its benevolent, transcendental, stroboscopic light--the raw power of heavenly zap!"

"Tell me this--what's happened with some of the movies you've made?"

"Well, out of the ten I've made, the last three have won the Lavender Fig Newton--highest prize in the pop pantheon. One had an all-transvestite cast. It was about Cinderella. She was played by a drag queen who turned out to be a dyke. Another prize winner was a very poignant film of Madame Nhu scratching her fingernails on a blackboard for eight hours. And my most recent spectacular, which will have its gala premiere next week, is a sixteen-hour split-screen silent musical comedy based on the Candy Mossler murder trial."

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"Do you dare question me--a filmic disciple of Syngman Rhee, Ezra Pound and Charles (Sonny) Liston?"

"I didn't know those guys made films."

"They don't. It's the kind of movie they'd make if they did make one that influenced me."

"I'm still not convinced you know what you're doing. I'd like to reconsider my investment. Send all this equipment back, give me all the film you've shot so far and----"

"Film?"

The Ultimate Surfer: The blond-on-bronze buoyant barefoot teenager with chromed surfboard balanced on his head is silhouetted against a forest of oil wells outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is wearing pollution-green-flowered bell-bottom jams and has a gold chain around his neck holding a medallion that proclaims a beautiful person for president in '68. He has gills and prehensile toes. His surfboard cost $17,000 (wholesale). It contains: stereo phonograph with earphones; spigots that dispense Coke, Pepsi, root beer, wax and suntan lotion; sunstroke pills; a rack with eight pairs of different-intensity sunglasses; and plastic water wings. His name is Neptune Zimmerman and he is the world's only Jewish surfer.

A county sheriff's car pulls up and an astonished officer gets out. He assumes that anyone dressed so weirdly on Highway 66 must be either a lost Cuban frogman or a nudist civil rights marcher. Neptune puts down his board, being careful not to block the sun's rays, and greets the sheriff with a friendly "Aloha."

"Hey, nudenik," the sheriff says.

"Where the hell do you think you're going without any clothes on?"

Fondling his $17,000 board, Zimmerman explains, "I'm surfing my way around the world. I started at Guam and rode a tidal wave to Malibu. I rode Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. Now I'm here waiting to ride a big black one."

The sheriff answered, "Ride a big black what?"

"A gusher, man. A gusher."

"I thought you guys skied in the ocean."

"Oceans are for gremmies. I'm over-stoked on curl soup cutout skeg first takeoff Banzai Pipeline south swell cross chop mushy. After I catch my gusher, I'm headed East to do some steep body surfing at the Big Niagara. Then it's all outward bound for the great lava flow at Mauna Loa. Gonna be the first mortal to ride from the beach into the water."

"What have you been smoking?"

"Us surf people never smoke. By the way, do you know if there are any sharks in a gusher?" Neptune turns and from a secret compartment in the board, removes a tube of zinc-oxide ointment and spreads it on his nose, the top of his ears, his gills, his lips, his knuckles, his tongue, and then covers the rest of himself and the board with Coppertone.

The sheriff, sure that Neptune has just performed an indecent sex act, starts to place him under arrest. Before he can get the handcuffs on, the earth suddenly begins to tremble and shake and a nearby oil well begins to spout and gush. Neptune grabs his board and, in a full run, yells, "Surf's up!"

When last seen, Neptune Zimmerman was hanging ten on the big black one heading toward Phoenix. The next morning, Tulsa was swamped with 1800 surfers, all squatting by Highway 66, waiting for the ninth gusher.

The Career Picketeer: Pudgy, 13-year-old Terra Tactic stops alongside Highway 61 near Hibbing, Minnesota, to put Clearasil on her acne and be interviewed by the local press. She is in the middle of a solitary protest march to commemorate Mario Savio's 25th birthday.

She wears a Cuban army field jacket, burlap miniskirt, a Spanish loyalist's cap and white go-go boots marked His and Hers.

Terra's knapsack is ornamented with fill-in-the-blanks political buttons, whose first words are abolish, defend, hands off and kill for. The knapsack contains no make-up or clothes. Instead, it is choked with a medium-sized mimeograph machine, 12 reams of paper, a postage meter and a valid American Express credit card stolen from her father's corporation. There is also the following reading material: The Prophet, Human Sexual Response, MacBird, Kropotkin's pamphlet on Lenin's position on women and the last four issues of Spiderman.

In response to a reporter's question, Terra chronicles her career, beginning with her birth on a picket line in front of Sing Sing in 1953, the day the Rosen-bergs were executed. At age eight, she was in the first freedom ride to Jackson, Mississippi. In 1962, she led the two-month fast in the Hollywood Bowl to protest Nixon's campaign for governor of California. In 1963, she was expelled from Miss Porter's finishing school after an LSD trip-in. In 1964, she led a glut-in in front of the World Health Organization in Geneva to protest the Nile pollution that was killing off crocodiles at an alarming rate. It was during this glut-in that she gained 40 pounds and developed a severe case of acne.

She spent most of 1965 receiving intensive psychotherapy in the $85-a-day Riggs Institute for the Living. Her parents committed her after an arrest for attempting self-immolation by drenching herself with Coca-Cola and singing "Things burn better with Coke" in front of the Billy Graham pavilion at the New York World's Fair.

She was released after leading a schizophrenics' sing-in on Hiroshima Day. Shortly thereafter, the Ford Foundation awarded her a grant to study prepubescent alienation.

"How have your political beliefs evolved during your five years as a picketeer?" asked one of the reporters.

"Politics is a bunch of crap. A girl like me, fat and with acne, has to do very weird things to be noticed by boys."

"You mean you go on marches for sex?"

"Partly. I figure, with all this walking in the sun, I'll lose weight and clear up my pimples and maybe I'll meet a man who wants me."

She hoists up her gear on hunched shoulders and starts plodding toward Walla Walla. Suddenly, a large black air-conditioned chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental with a low-number New York license plate comes to a discreet halt alongside her. Her balding father, fur-coated mother and bearded analyst leap out.

"All right, already," the mother moans. "Enough is enough. Your father's not a well man."

The weeping Terra is swept into the car, which silently tools east toward Great Neck.

The Young Lion: "Let me at em!" screams Zealot Gunn as he crashes through the door of the Marine Corps recruiting station, waving his green beret. He stops at the entrance and salutes the flag, the sergeant and a recruiting poster.

"I wanna join up with you leathernecks!"

The sergeant, thinking that at last he's found a boy who is eager to die for his country, leaps up, pumps the young man's hand and carefully looks him over.

Zealot's Eisenhower jacket is covered with Korean war medals and buttons urging the bombing of Hanoi, Havana, Greenwich Village and Berkeley.

"Why do you want to join up, son?" the sergeant asks.

Zealot rolls up his sleeves to reveal a tattoo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima on one thickly muscled biceps and corporal stripes tattooed on the other. "We have to stop godless atheistic communism from subverting the free world, fluoridating our water and peddling smut. I dream of fighting in General Walker's brigade, singing The Marine's Hymn with Audie Murphy and John Wayne, digging those trenches with Alan Ladd and Dana Andrews, bayoneting with Ronald Reagan and John Hodiak and dying with Robert Mitchum and John Garfield, while planes zoom overhead and hundreds of buglers play taps.

"How old are you, boy?" the sergeant asks.

"Seventeen. I just graduated today from Moral Rearmament Vocational High School."

"Good," the sergeant remarks. He then has Zealot fill out the forms and sends him in to undress for his physical.

A few minutes later, Zealot reappears wearing a white, hooded K. K. K. robe.

"Why the hell are you wearing that sheet?" the bewildered sergeant asks.

"If them yellow gooks can fight in their pajamas, why can't I wear my bed sheets?"

Suddenly, Zealot spies something outside. He leaps up and races into the street, where he grabs a small Chinese man. He pummels him, knocks him down with a karate chop and shouts: "V. C.--V. C. I got one." Zealot then brutally tortures his terrified victim to find out where the local Viet Cong positions are located.

Satisfied, Zealot returns to the recruiting station humming The Marine's Hymn and again salutes the startled sergeant. "Mission accomplished, General."

"What'd you do that for?" the sergeant asks. "That's only Sun Yat Starch, the guy who owns the hand laundry next door, where I send my shirts."

"But, General----"

"I'm sorry, boy, we're going to have to classify you Section Eight."

Zealot exits, vowing to have Senator Dodd investigate the "liberal pinko homosexual dope-fiend Asiatic-dupe pad-fist" take-over of the Marines.

Zealot then sprints to the nearest public telephone and dials the War Resistance League. "Staughton? It worked. I dodged the draft."

The Last Soul Singer: A fruit truck stops in front of the Brill Building, the mecca of pop music. Six-foot-four Blind Lemon Chitlin shambles off the crates in the back of the truck.

"Good luck, kid," the driver says as he hands him his battered, homemade 12-string guitar. "This is the big time."

Chitlin saunters toward the building humming a tune his mother taught him, called You've Been a Good Ol' Wagon, but You've Done Broke Down. He asks a passér-by to lead him to the building directory, where he feels around the raised letters on the board. His finger tips catch the name of the Soul Grits Record Company Ltd.

Filled with blind hope, Blind Lemon confronts the chairman of the board of Soul Gritts Ltd.--Irving Gritts.

Irving, an executive at 15, is vibrating gently behind a golden LP-shaped desk in his yeti-fur electrolounger, feet outstretched to exhibit his hand-tooled Day-Glo pink paisley vinyl elf boots. He sports a brocade vest (worn open to allow for the ruffles on the front of his shirt) and opalescent chartreuse bermudas with a platinum key chain fastened at the waist. His straight blond hair cascades to his shoulder blades, framing a sallow, microbiotic face.

He is doodling dollar signs as he talks on three Scandinavian pedestal phones at once to Erik Jacobsen, Tim Leary and his high school geometry teacher. He gestures Blind Lemon to a chair.

Unable to see the gesture, Blind Lemon impatiently shuffles his feet in place as he waits for some word from Irving Gritts.

"Go plug in," Irving demands.

"Plug in, man, I don't even turn on. I just wanna sing my blues," Blind Lemon says, clutching his guitar. "My momma was Bessie Smith, my poppa was Lead-belly, and I can sing my blues."

"Sorry, baby, I'm not familiar with them. Did they ever have anything on the charts?"

"I just hitched up from Greenwood, Mistah Irving, so I can play some delta blues. Ya hear?"

"Well, Simon and Garfunkel are cutting a record this aft'noon and they need a guitarist. Their regular was electrocuted at the last session."

"Simon and who?"

"You don't know Simon and Garfunkel? Man, you got no culchah! No soul!"

"No soul, man? Why, I was pickin' cotton at three, singin' in a sanctified church at five, layin' rail on a chain gang at seven, I went blind at thirteen and started share-croppin' at eighteen...."

"Look, you don't play electric guitar, you don't know Simon and Garfunkel, you even dress funny--and you got cotton balls in your ears. And besides, you gotta have a funkier name than Blind Lemon Chitlin--something like Sop-with Camel, Texas Book Depository Building, Lothar and the Hand People, Rabble Without a Cause or Little Buddha and the Dropouts."

Blind Lemon spends the next four hours in the Brill Building trying to get past the secretaries of the other record companies--Red Beans LSD Music; Carnaby Chain. Gang Records; Banana Ltd.; Surf and Soul Songs; High, Hominy and Harmony; Amps, Ohms and Revolt.

Dejected, he sits on the curb in front of the Brill Building. To his guitar, he moans, "Baby, there ain't no love in a white man's skyscraper."

Dylan Darlin', the 12-year-old king of the Brill Building, gets off his chauffeur-driven Honda and stops in his tracks.

"What'd you say, boy?" he exclaims.

"Baby, there ain't no love in a white man's skyscraper."

"That's an oldy but goldy if I ever heard one," shouts Darlin'. "Here's a fifty-thousand-dollar contract."

The youthful genius immediately changes his discovery's name to Realemon and the Bad Seed--a group made up of Blind Lemon and the three youngest children of the notorious Gallo gang.

Within a month's time, true to Darlin's vision, the group is number one on the charts in 18 countries--including South Africa--and pop music is revolutionized by the delta-dago sound.

The Little Camper: The following letter was found in the debris of a large Bel Air home that had been destroyed by a fire caused by an explosion in a homemade chemistry lab. A reading of the letter will reveal yet another aspect of the rampant bopper culture.

Dear Mommas and Poppas,

Here at Camp Acid, things are still pretty groovy. There's plenty of grass at Pillbrook and we take two trips every day. My counselor, Ed Sanders, is a nice enough guy--at night, he reads us bed-time stories from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The best thing about this place is that the counselors are out of sight. Gerd Stern teaches arts and crafts--you should see my light-pulsation, mandala-shaped. ceramic-tile "roach" holder. Ralph Giuzburg edits the camp newspaper. Norman Mailer is the (continued on page 242)Bopper Brigade(continued from page 188) self-defense instructor. Andy Warhol teaches still pornography. And the music counselor is Ali Akbar Khan.

We have two religious services a week --the Christian one is led by John Lennon and the Hindu priest is George Harrison. William Burroughs is the camp doctor.

There are no square sports here at Camp Acid--our grand guru is totally turned off by the game-playing syndrome of the middle-aged, middle-class, whiskey-drinking, straight-moking, symbol-manipulating, napalm-bombing establishment fink-outs--but we do do some interesting exercises from a how-to book called the Kama Sutra. My only complaint is about the food. We have two chefs, named Yin and Yang, and they don't give us much to eat. I'm getting a little tired of morning-glory seeds, salt and nutmeg on my peyote cereal.

The other night, the head counselor, Tim Leary, gave a consciousness-expansion lecture. He demonstrated three new ways to blow your mind without drugs--hip frontal lobotomy, irreversible visions through acupuncture of the eye and a tourniquet of the heart.

A lot of the counselors are very paranoid because the man who drives the garbage truck into camp every day looks like Harry Anslinger and all the garbage men look like narcos.

My team won this summer's hallucination contest. We had three freak-out days of time-lapse gangster grass inner-space voyage 390-microgrammed wasted karma leaf zonked strung out mandala boo stoned complete with total mind-warp--and not a bummer in the crowd. It was great fun. We yelled the camp cheer: Two, four, six, eight--we wanna hallucinate. And we sang the camp marching song: Eight Miles High.

Well, I'd better take a downie now and get some sleep. We've got to get up early for our trip tomorrow and they don't use a bugle for reveille here. Instead, they turn on these bright flashing strobe lights. Boy, does that get you out of bed fast.

Try to make it Sunday--you'll really flip! You'll be real proud. They're gonna give me the Lenny Bruce Memorial Award for Self-Destruction. I got it for shooting up with Mr. Clean.

Your loving psychedelic son, Heady Stone

The Flower Girl: Sixteen-year-old Fleur d'Amour, golden hair flowing down around her ankles, walks down Ashbury Street peddling Mindfreak, San Francisco's superpsychedelic magazine. Passers-by stop to gawk at her costume, which consists of knee-high rawhide boots with polished-aluminum trim, a miniskirt woven from dried grass and a multicolored shawl that is wrapped around her upper torso and trails ten feet behind her. The train of the shawl is made from red and yellow flowers, which she offers benignly to each of the people on the street. A sign has been stenciled in Day-Glo green and blue letters on the front of her shawl; it reads: send your ego on a trip--you'll feel a whole lot better when it's gone.

When she finishes peddling her magazines, Fleur wanders over to a vegetable store, where she boosts handfuls of scallions, carrots and black-eyed peas. She hustles out of the place and makes her way down a side street, where scores of down-and-out vagrants and long-haired teenagers have formed a line in front of a small coal stove with a 50-gallon oil drum on top. A young man in stovepipe hat, granny glasses, Japanese geta and frayed coveralls with matching fluorescent patches is perched shakily on card-board boxes piled beside the drum so he can stir its bubbling contents. He has flaxen hair down to his waist, which occasionally strays into the drum.

As he stirs, he sings:

The power of love gets bigger and bigger,

Oh, give up your greed and join as a Digger.

Each member is pure in our jolly good group,

And no one has died from our greasy warm soup.

It is Fleur's boyfriend, Jon Quill.

Fleur helps Jon distribute the broth to the scraggly group and then gives him a present, a brownie made from dandelion leaves and a pinch of marijuana that she baked herself. They go off together, passing the brownie back and forth between them, chewing very slowly.

They head for San Francisco's newest gathering place, The Flower Pot. Written on its window in flowing, paisley scrawl is the word inhalatorium. Inside are rows of small enclosures, each containing a barrel filled with dried, fragrant petals. The barrels are marked with small signs--camellias, orchids, bachelor's-buttons, morning-glories and diverse others. The Pot is crowded with people sitting around the barrels sniffing their favorite fragrances. Fleur and Jon put on their rose-colored glasses and are about to enter when they are stopped by a well-known San Francisco narcotics detective. "Hark, the narc!" Jon Quill says. "It's the fuzz called Mork."

"Funny running into you, Jon Quill," Mork says. "I have been thinking that you and I should chat. It has come to my attention that you are holding large amounts of illegal fruit."

"Nay, 'tis a base canard," Jon responds. "All I have are Fleur's humble roses."

Mork eyes Fleur suspiciously. "Why must you aggress?" she asks Mork. "Thou should be wise, not willful. I will instruct you." She reaches under her shawl and brings out a copy of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. She opens it at random and reads, "The people take diverse paths. The leader does not own the throughway."

"Don't wise off," Mork says. "I should run the two of you in."

"We love you," say Jon and Fleur together.

Then Jon takes a rose from Fleur's train and pins it to Mork's lapel. Mork is stunned. "That's it. That's it!" he screams. He pulls out his San Francisco Policeman's Drug Guide. 1600 carefully Xeroxed pages. Under "Roses, wild." it says. "Effect: mild exultation; method of use: inhalation. This drug is probably dangerous." "Let's go," Mork says to Jon Quill. He pushes the long-haired boy to a nearby police cruiser. Jon is forced in, but he casts a beatific farewell glance toward Fleur d'Amour.

"Forget me not, Jon Quill." she calls, as the car swings out into the traffic.

The Perfect Teeny-Bopper: Thirteen-year-old Chér Supreme emerges from the Psychedelic Lights record store on Haight Street in San Francisco. She removes three stolen albums from underneath her Fifth Fleet pea jacket and starts off to meet her boyfriend. 15-year-old Frodo Farina, at the Vatican Discothèque, where they have an audition. On the way, she panhandles a well-dressed man for ten dollars and immediately buys some pot at a bus stop from a sweet little old lady, who keeps the stash in a Safeway shopping bag. Chér begins to smoke it from a hookah that has been cleverly disguised to look like a bagpipe. She alternates drags with riffs from Puff (the Magic Dragon).

In front of the Vatican, her boyfriend Frodo is waiting for her. They are dressed exactly alike: Beatle boots, black bell-bottom hip-hugging Viet Gong pajama bottoms and Fifth Fleet pea jackets. They each have their own transistor stereo earplugs tuned to the local r&b station. Both have shoulder-length straight blond hair. They look like twins, except that he's wearing two earrings and she's wearing one.

At the Vatican, they are asked some questions by the club's booker.

"Where are you kids from?"

"I'm from Shaker Heights and Chér is from Grosse Pointe."

"How did you meet?"

Chér says, "Well, I flew out here on Daddy's Lear jet and enrolled in the Free University, where Frodo was teaching a course called Trotsky's Influence on the Motown Sound. But we were both expelled for leading a student protest against the CIA research going on in the school's chemistry lab."

After the interview, they are greeted by the club's owner, Joe Mafioso.

Frodo and Chér get up on the stage and start to sing their first number. They accompany themselves on an electric washboard and an amplified comb, It sounds like a combination of Ornette Coleman and Bob Dylan screaming with his foot caught in a barbed-wire fence.

After 30 seconds, Mr. Mafioso shouts. "Mah-rone! What the hell do you call that noise? Joe Valachi sings better than you two girls!"

Frodo pleads, "Don't make fun of our country-and-money music. It took us hours to perfect."

Mafioso screams, "I invested forty thousand dollars in this club and you expect me to let you sing that crap? It sounds like a combination of Ornette Coleman and Bob Dylan screaming with his foot caught in a barbed-wire fence. Get the hell out of here!"

Frodo breaks down and begins to weep. His body convulses in country-and-money sobs.

Recalling a phrase from her own analysis, Chér says, "Mafioso, you're nothing but an ungiving parasitic father figure, threatened by dirt and money. We're buying you out for fifty thousand dollars!" She reaches into her Army-surplus ammunition-bag purse and throws large bundles of $100 bills at his feet.

As Mafioso retreats, they start singing their madrigal-rock version of Home on the Range.