Speaker 1: Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello, Hello, it's a message from your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 2: That's a crass reference. It's the show about crass. I'm
Speaker 2: allowed to make crass references. That's the thing that I
Speaker 2: can do. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. Welcome to Cool
Speaker 2: People Who Did cool stuff. And it's a podcast. It's
Speaker 2: part two. You should figure that out by now. But
Speaker 2: I have to always ramble incoherently at the start of
Speaker 2: every episode until I introduce my guest, which this week
Speaker 2: is Julie Holland.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 1: Hello, I'm fine. How are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm okay. We're recording this the same time as last time,
Speaker 2: so we're both actually dealing with ambient horror of the
Speaker 2: destruction of the little positive things that the government it
Speaker 2: did for people. But you know, it's okay. The sun
Speaker 2: will eat the earth eventually, anyway. That's what I always
Speaker 2: remind myself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I just grab all the coping mechanisms that work,
Speaker 3: you know, whenever I need them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is, that is what they're there for. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna eat ice cream after this. That's my primary coping
Speaker 2: mechanism for real. Yeah, yeah, I eat vegan ice cream.
Speaker 2: As after when when times ago are hard, I eat
Speaker 2: ice cream.
Speaker 4: It's great.
Speaker 2: I have no regrets.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you need this, like the blood sugar to your
Speaker 3: brain immediately.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like it's important that every podcast are
Speaker 2: of like at least some sort of terrible thing that
Speaker 2: they do to their body. But I like, basically don't
Speaker 2: do drugs or drink, so I hit upon sugar.
Speaker 1: The thing that works absolutely the best for me is
Speaker 1: just working out. It's just it just.
Speaker 2: That's the good version that makes you, that makes your
Speaker 2: life better.
Speaker 3: Drinking doesn't do anything for me. I like mescal, but
Speaker 3: drinking doesn't. You know, it's not a coping mechanism. I
Speaker 3: tried that one time and I was like, oh, this
Speaker 3: doesn't do shit for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, drug stress me out and then you like worry
Speaker 2: about the police and stuff. I was terrible when I did.
Speaker 2: I never understood because like when I was like a
Speaker 2: street kid, I feel like I got searched by cops
Speaker 2: like three or four times a week, and so I
Speaker 2: just didn't understand how people did drugs. I was like,
Speaker 2: if you have drugs, you get caught. I don't understand.
Speaker 1: And taxes. I was a street kid in taxes and
Speaker 1: we did rote atessin.
Speaker 2: It's what they did in high school. But because I yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: it's legal. Yeah. Uh, the kids don't do drugs anyway,
Speaker 2: don't do drugs, yeah, don't whatever. So we're talking about punk,
Speaker 2: which has all kinds of opinions about drugs. Actually one
Speaker 2: of the things that I didn't even get into. And
Speaker 2: some of the old West Coast punk scenes they literally
Speaker 2: had people already talking about like before straight edge people
Speaker 2: were like had critiques of how the hippies were dropping
Speaker 2: out and by using drugs they were like backly dulling
Speaker 2: their senses. They were making straight edge arguments in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven on the West Coast. Yeah, and it was
Speaker 2: just really interesting to me anyway. So in the US
Speaker 2: you have the reproletarianization of the middle class, right, more
Speaker 2: and more people are suddenly I mean, middle classes a
Speaker 2: lie anyway, Either you work for money or you don't.
Speaker 2: If you make money by owning things, then you are
Speaker 2: not working class. If you make money by working, you
Speaker 2: are working class. But the middle class is a conception
Speaker 2: that people come up with, and people were falling out
Speaker 2: of it. But the UK's economy wasn't doing particularly better
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy four, a successful minor strike brought down
Speaker 2: the Conservative government, which meant that labor was in charge
Speaker 2: when the economy fell apart and the country went to
Speaker 2: the International Monetary Fund for a loan. In the year
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six, the country saw twenty three percent inflation.
Speaker 2: And I think we've talked about this a couple times
Speaker 2: in the show before. If you get a loan from
Speaker 2: the International Monetary Fund, it's like going to a loan shark.
Speaker 2: But instead of like they're.
Speaker 1: The devil, they're the devil. You're making a deal with
Speaker 1: the devil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, instead of breaking your legs, they break the working
Speaker 2: class of your country's legs. And that same year there
Speaker 2: was a massive drought and a huge heat wave and
Speaker 2: everyone was told to cut their water use by half.
Speaker 2: It was so hot that the pavement was melting or
Speaker 2: tarmac as they call it over there. But what's funny
Speaker 2: is so that happens all the time now over there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just regular.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unemployment had more than doubled as far as they
Speaker 2: can tell. The reason the economy of the UK fell
Speaker 2: so hard was basically that had been built on the
Speaker 2: blood of the colonies and the colonies had broken free.
Speaker 2: So the collapse of the empire fucked the UK good,
Speaker 2: I mean fuck them, but like.
Speaker 1: It mostly fell on the working class, who's who was fault.
Speaker 2: It was not right totally, but they still for a
Speaker 2: moment had kind of a strong social net until Thatcher
Speaker 2: in the eighties. And we'll talk about that. But like,
Speaker 2: while compared to the US, that still whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, compared to the US there they're doing so much better.
Speaker 3: I was on tour and I needed to get some antibiotics.
Speaker 1: And it just it blew my mind how easy it
Speaker 1: was over there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, at midnight, at midnight, I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: damn it, I have a ut.
Speaker 1: This is a uti, you know, and we got a sorted.
Speaker 1: It was amazing.
Speaker 2: I remember once staying with my friend in a French
Speaker 2: squat and she had fucked up her thumb and like
Speaker 2: pretty badly. She needed to go to the doctor. And
Speaker 2: I was like, God, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2: And she was like, I don't know. And then in
Speaker 2: the morning I talked to her and she was like, Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm French, I'm just going to go to the doctor.
Speaker 2: I'm not in America. Like even though I'm a broke squatter,
Speaker 2: I can get my thumb taken care of, you know.
Speaker 1: It's so beautiful.
Speaker 3: A lovely friend of mine got pregnant in Texas, moved
Speaker 3: to France. Yeah, and she had ended up having like
Speaker 3: a pretty complicated pregnancy and she had to stay a
Speaker 3: little bit longer in the birth center or whatever, in
Speaker 3: the hospital, whatever it was.
Speaker 1: And on her way out, the French nurses were like,
Speaker 1: we're so sorry, we're going to have to you know,
Speaker 1: because you're American.
Speaker 3: Nothing that's not all covered. I'm so sorry, we're going
Speaker 3: to have to ask you to cover this. It was
Speaker 3: twenty euros.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the UK it's not doing so well, but
Speaker 2: you know, everything's comparable to other things. The UK was
Speaker 2: having a moment too, where it was pondering something that
Speaker 2: it always seems to be pondering. It was pondering should
Speaker 2: we become even more racist? In nineteen seventy six. You
Speaker 2: ever seen Eric Clapton's racist tirade from nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 3: No, that's hilarious. I think I heard a more recent one.
Speaker 1: No's he's for someone who built his career off off
Speaker 1: like very not subtle shade of blackface. That man has
Speaker 1: some fucking golf.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In nineteen seventy six, the famous guitarist Eric Clapton
Speaker 2: went on stage and gave this massive fucking racist rant
Speaker 2: that I will not and cannot read on air, full
Speaker 2: of old timey slurs telling foreigners to leave the country.
Speaker 2: He starts it off with by being like, hey, do
Speaker 2: I have any foreigners in the crowd? Raise your hands,
Speaker 2: get out of here. And then he goes on and
Speaker 2: in this he says, quote, I used to be into dope.
Speaker 2: Now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. And then
Speaker 2: he shouted keep Britain white. This was not subtle.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly unsubtle.
Speaker 2: Good for him, yeah, something like in twenty eighteen he
Speaker 2: finally he apologized for saying half racist stuff. And I'm like,
Speaker 2: you literally said I'm into racism. That's not half that's
Speaker 2: the whole thing, that's all of racism. When you say
Speaker 2: I am into racism, they.
Speaker 1: Love caging and pretending something's a joke, like I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah yeah. And this is literally the reason that
Speaker 2: the social movement and like concert movement Rock against Racism
Speaker 2: started in the UK was in response to Eric Clapton
Speaker 2: being a massive bigot eventually passed that torch on to Morrissey,
Speaker 2: as we all know, but he started Yeah, that broke
Speaker 2: my heart. I know that one. That one fucked me up.
Speaker 1: I saw him kind of recently, just just by chance,
Speaker 1: because he was at like a festival. He was so good.
Speaker 1: I wanted to come back.
Speaker 2: I believe he's a good musician, but a good songwriter.
Speaker 1: He was.
Speaker 3: It was glorious. He sounded amazing. I want him to
Speaker 3: like go to some rehab or something.
Speaker 2: I want to racism rehab, racism rehab, I think because
Speaker 2: he said it takes courage to be gentle and kind,
Speaker 2: come on, which just means he's a coward. Yep, he
Speaker 2: does not have the courage to be gentle and kind.
Speaker 2: He's a massive bigot. And if I was in the UK,
Speaker 2: you could sue me, but I'm not. I'm in the
Speaker 2: US anyway. So England was having a moment. They were
Speaker 2: really going through some stuff. When the sex Pistols came
Speaker 2: on to one of the three TV channels in England
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy six and were goaded into saying the
Speaker 2: word shit shyly. This was a huge, huge deal. I
Speaker 2: expected this to be like when Rage against the machine
Speaker 2: like went on BBC and like, uh, played fuck you.
Speaker 2: I won't do what you tell me without censoring it,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, which is a brilliant moment in music history.
Speaker 2: But literally, they like kind of said something under their
Speaker 2: breath and the guy was like, wait, what did you say?
Speaker 2: And he was like, oh, I said something I can't say.
Speaker 2: And the guy's like, no, what did you say? And
Speaker 2: he's like oh shit, and they're like ah back in
Speaker 2: the seventy something seventy six, yeah, and then punk was everywhere.
Speaker 2: This was the best pr move they could have possibly made.
Speaker 2: Although they almost went to jail. I think I don't
Speaker 2: know enough about sex pesscical history. I don't care enough
Speaker 2: about them. This it blew up. But as a mainstream fad,
Speaker 2: by nineteen seventy eight, Punk's moment in the sun had passed.
Speaker 2: New Wave was in, except there were now scores of
Speaker 2: punks and they weren't going to move on. They were
Speaker 2: going to build a worldwide scene and they were going
Speaker 2: to build it more DIY, a bit more underground. But
Speaker 2: you can't even truly I mean you're talking about millions
Speaker 2: and millions of records. It's just not on TV to
Speaker 2: the same degree after nineteen seventy eight to cut over
Speaker 2: to Canada for a second. As author and eco terrorist
Speaker 2: Anne Hanson put in her book direct Action Memoirs of
Speaker 2: an Urban Gorilla, she wrote, quote, the parents of the
Speaker 2: punk kids were wooed into complacency through slick marketing of
Speaker 2: the illusion that corporate America was moving towards a society
Speaker 2: free of pollution, with equal opportunities for all. Both men
Speaker 2: and women could drive to their corporate offices and their
Speaker 2: BMW's listening to the sounds of Bob Dylan or the
Speaker 2: Rolling Stones. At school, the punk kids were pushed to
Speaker 2: make decisions about their future careers by the age of
Speaker 2: twelve so that they could end up in the right
Speaker 2: stream that would lead to well paid jobs for the
Speaker 2: privileged few who could afford to go to university. And
Speaker 2: that didn't happen. So that's what punk was the response to.
Speaker 2: And instead these kids disappeared into DIY spaces and they
Speaker 2: built a vibrant and chaotic scene. The dancing and early
Speaker 2: punk was dead simple. If nothing else, you just pogo.
Speaker 2: You just jump up and down in time to the music,
Speaker 2: or not in time to the music, as I usually did.
Speaker 2: Stage diving was a staple of early shows in particular,
Speaker 2: which is essentially a trustful you climb up onto the stage,
Speaker 2: breaking the rules of the venue and the barrier between
Speaker 2: band and audience, and then jump into the crowd, trusting
Speaker 2: that strangers will catch you. The previous generation had had
Speaker 2: these huge stadium rock bands with their finely tuned sound,
Speaker 2: with millionaire rock stars who were further and further from
Speaker 2: any working classroots that they might have come from. Some
Speaker 2: of them still sang about revolution, but it was hard
Speaker 2: to believe them. With punk, anyone can make a band,
Speaker 2: anyone can make a fanzine. A fanzine called Strangled put
Speaker 2: out a cover that showed how to play three chords,
Speaker 2: with the caption here's three chords, Now form a band.
Speaker 1: That's great.
Speaker 2: That's so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3: I always remember the the Beatles talking about walking across
Speaker 3: town to find somebody who knew another knew how to
Speaker 3: play another chord.
Speaker 2: I love like even more than punk music. I love punk,
Speaker 2: the punk ethos, and I love the idea that like
Speaker 2: you can go to a show and listen to your
Speaker 2: friends who suck and have an amazing time, and you
Speaker 2: can go to a show and listen to your friends
Speaker 2: who are amazing and have an amazing time. And your
Speaker 2: friends who are amazing might break out of that local
Speaker 2: scene and play nationally, or they might break bigger than
Speaker 2: that and play internationally or signed to a label or
Speaker 2: whatever the hell, right, But that doesn't make them better
Speaker 2: than the band that sucks it. Just well, it makes
Speaker 2: their music better, but it doesn't make them like as
Speaker 2: people better, and it doesn't even necessarily make it. You're
Speaker 2: still gonna have an amazing time at like a basement
Speaker 2: punk show, you know, I mean, or you're gonna have
Speaker 2: a terrible time, depending on punk is not perfect. But like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, I love that about punk. I love
Speaker 2: that And it's actually funny because it's like people complain
Speaker 2: all the time about how everyone has podcasts, and I
Speaker 2: sometimes complain all the time about how everyone has podcasts.
Speaker 2: I mostly complain about how I have a lot of podcasts.
Speaker 2: But I lovets, Oh thank you. But I love that
Speaker 2: anyone can start a podcast, I you know, like I
Speaker 2: love that it it's it's it's zines. It reminds me
Speaker 2: of zines as a culture thing, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a radio zine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And some people are listened to by ten people,
Speaker 2: and some people are listening by ten million people and whatever.
Speaker 2: You know, that's cool.
Speaker 1: It's a little de democratic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if you get enough listeners, dear listener, on
Speaker 2: your podcast, here's three chords. Start a podcast, you might
Speaker 2: end up one day pivoting to ads. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: That's why I get paid at all. And we're back.
Speaker 2: So you have these bands that you know, sex Pistols
Speaker 2: is running around saying anarchy in the UK. You have
Speaker 2: enough people run around saying anarchy in the UK long enough,
Speaker 2: and suddenly you're going to find people who mean it.
Speaker 2: Suddenly the anarchists are going to come onto the scene
Speaker 2: in a major way. And if you want to be
Speaker 2: cynical about it, to spoil next week's content, you guys
Speaker 2: sort of this pissing contest who's like the most authentic
Speaker 2: versus everyone else who's like a poser or sellout or whatever.
Speaker 2: But we're not going to focus on the bad elements
Speaker 2: of punk just yet. And no one epitomized living true
Speaker 2: to your values more than the band Crass, at least
Speaker 2: at first. They are the band that spearheaded this particular
Speaker 2: wave of anarcho punk and in order to talk about crass,
Speaker 2: we have to talk about the fact that they're all
Speaker 2: a bunch of hippies, which is like one of my
Speaker 2: favorite things about them, well, most of them. One of
Speaker 2: them was a young punk.
Speaker 1: How are we defining hippie in this sense?
Speaker 2: I will tell you, and I believe you're gonna believe me. Well,
Speaker 2: they wouldn't have called themselves hipies. They would have called
Speaker 2: themselves freaks. I love that they're like from the movement
Speaker 2: that would be called by a mainstream person like hippies,
Speaker 2: but amongst themselves they identified as freaks. God, all that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff gets so complicated. Like I remember, like
Speaker 2: trying to explain to someone the difference between a krusty
Speaker 2: and a crustpunk.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, yeah, exactly. I always remember this comic.
Speaker 3: I forget what it was who drew it, but there
Speaker 3: was this, uh, somebody's calling this woman a hippie and
Speaker 3: she ended up doing something real tough at the end,
Speaker 3: and she's like, I told you, I'm not a hippie.
Speaker 1: Hippies are nice.
Speaker 2: And what's really funny is that like Crafts are pacifists,
Speaker 2: but they're angry about it. I wouldn't even know I
Speaker 2: call them nice. So yeah, like I like.
Speaker 1: Freak, that's that's uh, that's useful.
Speaker 3: I mean coming from Houston and being out and queer
Speaker 3: since I was thirteen, like I fully you know, experienced.
Speaker 1: The other ring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like how it was so funny, like how
Speaker 3: easy it was to be a freak growing up in
Speaker 3: Houston in the eighties.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I I I think it's kind of fun to
Speaker 2: have these like labels that are non labels like queer,
Speaker 2: you know, like freak. Kind of feels like it could
Speaker 2: be that where you're like, I don't know whatever, there's
Speaker 2: lots of different things. I'm not pinning it down for
Speaker 2: you figured it out yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a very it's a very big banner.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so we're going to start with two of
Speaker 2: the folks behind Crass, a man named Penny Rimbo and
Speaker 2: a woman named jeev Ousher. Geev Ousher was born in London.
Speaker 2: She was the youngest of four children in a working
Speaker 2: class family. Her older brother died at age twelve when
Speaker 2: I think she was four. Her dad cleaned out chemical
Speaker 2: boilers at the Ford Factory and did not live to
Speaker 2: be old because that's not a good way to live.
Speaker 2: To be old.
Speaker 1: It's a terrifying job.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Her mom made sure that they still got to
Speaker 2: go on holiday every year, but that meant they took
Speaker 2: a car three miles down the road. When she was
Speaker 2: sixteen or so, she went off to art school, the
Speaker 2: South East Essex Technical College and School of Art. It's
Speaker 2: a trade school primarily most of the students are in
Speaker 2: the trades like welders and shit. But they have an
Speaker 2: art school.
Speaker 1: There too, so like probably commercial art.
Speaker 2: Yep, exactly, that's the next line. It focused on commercial art,
Speaker 2: graphic design, illustration, that kind of thing, and not like
Speaker 2: art for art's sake or avant garde and not.
Speaker 1: Like high art.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she was one of only two working class people
Speaker 2: in the place, and she put her nose to the
Speaker 2: grindstone and worked her ass off while her more middle
Speaker 2: class and upper middle class peers were more willing to
Speaker 2: just kind of fuck around. One of those people who
Speaker 2: was willing to kind of just fuck around because he
Speaker 2: was from a more middle class or upper middle class background,
Speaker 2: was a man who named himself Penny Rimbo. Penny is
Speaker 2: a girl's name in England, and I think that's worth knowing.
Speaker 2: And I love when men take on women's names because
Speaker 2: I did it for a decade before I came out
Speaker 2: as trans. And also there's like a weird, just long
Speaker 2: history of musicians doing that. The two of them, they
Speaker 2: were more into the artsy shit than the commercial shit,
Speaker 2: and they became friends and they fell in love. G
Speaker 2: was a beat who dressed like a tomboy, but with
Speaker 2: stockings and short skirt. This is the early sixties. Penny, meanwhile,
Speaker 2: wore a combat jacket and Chelsea boots, which are those
Speaker 2: boots that rural lesbians wear. That's like my identification with
Speaker 2: Chelsea boots, you know, like if you're like, oh, those
Speaker 2: boots that every queer person I know who lives in
Speaker 2: the country whars those. Penny had been born outside of
Speaker 2: London in nineteen forty three to a upper middle class family.
Speaker 2: His father fought in the war World War II as
Speaker 2: an engineer, blowing up and rebuilding bridges across Europe and Africa,
Speaker 2: and then wound up working for the World Bank, which
Speaker 2: is not a good way to be ethical. Penny has
Speaker 2: dedicated his life to being a class trader, though an
Speaker 2: awful lot has been written, and I've read an awful
Speaker 2: lot about how class affects his politics a lot of people.
Speaker 2: The fact that he's middle class is used against the
Speaker 2: band Crass constantly, even though many of the members, including
Speaker 2: the kind of primary singer, was working class. Whatever. He
Speaker 2: rejected wealth from a young age. He wrote once quote,
Speaker 2: ever since I was a kid, I thought that whatever
Speaker 2: I got, i'd share. What else can you do? I
Speaker 2: don't really believe you can change governments, but you can
Speaker 2: change your immediate environment. You can live a life of
Speaker 2: sharing and giving and taking. His first political campaign was
Speaker 2: the campaign for nuclear disarmament, And it seems like he
Speaker 2: was always very concerned about authenticity right from the start.
Speaker 2: He's like kind of the main it seems like the
Speaker 2: one who's just like no, anything that is not true
Speaker 2: to our values in the following specific way is you know,
Speaker 2: like he was into the Beatles for a while, but
Speaker 2: then he was annoyed at them for selling out. And
Speaker 2: at one point while he was in school, for anyone
Speaker 2: who can't see Jolie's making a like yeah whatever, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like how how are what does that even mean?
Speaker 3: They had like all those screaming girls, like they couldn't
Speaker 3: even they couldn't even play music.
Speaker 1: After a while, like how how could they not sell out?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the whole discourse around selling out. We're gonna
Speaker 2: talk to you about it more when we started talking
Speaker 2: about like how Cress kind of developed what they developed into,
Speaker 2: which I actually I mean I still like crass, but
Speaker 2: like I don't give a shit about the conceptions of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies like UK punks about what counts the selling out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just funny.
Speaker 3: I mean the idea that the Beatles were not sold
Speaker 3: out from the beginning is also really funny.
Speaker 1: I mean they kind of went.
Speaker 3: The other way. They moved toward they tried to move
Speaker 3: toward art.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they got artsy, Yeah, totally. At one point while
Speaker 2: it was in school, he won a contest to make
Speaker 2: pop art for the Beatles. But then he didn't let
Speaker 2: the Beatles sign his painting because he didn't want them
Speaker 2: scribbling all over his art. And that's classy, sang.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's really having a backbone right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. G was maybe the more directly political of the
Speaker 2: pair of them in terms of like being concerned not
Speaker 2: just in like ethical values, but like political campaigns. She
Speaker 2: was radicalized at school. She got really involved after the
Speaker 2: Aberfan disaster in nineteen six sixty six. In October, a
Speaker 2: slag heap from a coal mine slid into a Welsh village,
Speaker 2: killing one hundred and forty four people, mostly children between
Speaker 2: seven and ten years old. Because it crushed some schools.
Speaker 1: Oh so sad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it the whole thing had been preventable. People
Speaker 2: knew that it was going to happen. And I've, like
Speaker 2: I live in West Virginia, I've like had some hand
Speaker 2: in like some of the coal mining protests and stuff
Speaker 2: around here, and like the same kind of stuff happens,
Speaker 2: Like the stuff from coal mining just gets like stuffed
Speaker 2: wherever they can, and they do it as cheaply as possible,
Speaker 2: and then the dam's break and then it kills people
Speaker 2: because they don't care about poor people. And that's probably
Speaker 2: going to be a shocker to the listeners this podcast.
Speaker 2: And after they got out of school, g goes off
Speaker 2: to the Royal College of Art but was rejected from it,
Speaker 2: so she starts working at an art center so that
Speaker 2: kids can come and learn art if their schools didn't
Speaker 2: offer it. Penny meanwhile as an art teacher too, working
Speaker 2: at a continuing education center, and feminism was always on
Speaker 2: their minds, I actually would say that, like their commitment
Speaker 2: to feminism and pacifism is like more actual part of
Speaker 2: their politics than like anarchism specifically.
Speaker 3: I feel like my scene of friends that loved Crass
Speaker 3: were politicized.
Speaker 1: By them and in a really beautiful way.
Speaker 3: And I wish that that group of people had taken
Speaker 3: the feminism a little bit more to heart.
Speaker 2: That is an ongoing thing for Crass with their fans,
Speaker 2: because like, pretty fairly shortly along in the band, there's
Speaker 2: like multiple women in the band and they have like
Speaker 2: women are singing actively feminist songs, and then some of
Speaker 2: the men start writing and singing feminist songs about like
Speaker 2: how masculinity is defined and how we need to betray
Speaker 2: it and like all this stuff, and they would still
Speaker 2: just be like, Yep, our fans will sing along and
Speaker 2: don't do anything about it.
Speaker 1: But so Ghost, it's hard. It's hard. Feminism is hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And G wanted to prioritize her independence, so after
Speaker 2: college they both started renting rural places about ten minutes
Speaker 2: away from they just like lived near each other instead
Speaker 2: of moving in together. Right, she was like, well, I
Speaker 2: need to be my own person.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And after a couple of years, and this makes
Speaker 2: sense to me, you know. After a couple of years,
Speaker 2: g moved in with Penny in the place that is
Speaker 2: now legendary, a place called dial House. And when I
Speaker 2: say legendary, I mean to a very small subsection of people,
Speaker 2: but it used to be a large subsection of people.
Speaker 2: An hour outside of London, there's a town called Epping.
Speaker 2: Outside of Epping, there's a village called north Weald. Outside
Speaker 2: north Wild there is a cottage called dial House. UK
Speaker 2: addresses are funny because a lot of the houses of names.
Speaker 2: I used to laugh every time i'd send a package
Speaker 2: to England when I did distro, because I'd be addressing
Speaker 2: it to like Icicle manor third Rock past the Lane
Speaker 2: in Merlinshire or whatever. Fully, and I told this to
Speaker 2: my UK friend and she pointed out that every American
Speaker 2: address is one nine, three, two, one four, five six
Speaker 2: seventy fourth Street B. She got her ass. Dial House
Speaker 2: was first built in the fourteen hundreds, speaking of just
Speaker 2: like I mean, just I don't know whatever. It was
Speaker 2: built in the fourteen hundreds and slowly expanded over the centuries,
Speaker 2: but it had been derelict for a long time. When
Speaker 2: Penny moved in. When I first heard about dial house,
Speaker 2: I just literally assumed that he was like a trust
Speaker 2: fund kid and his parents had bought him a house
Speaker 2: when he got out of school. You know, Yeah, this
Speaker 2: is not what happened. He actually worked and for many,
Speaker 2: many years, I think for decades they rented the place.
Speaker 2: It had been derelict for years, and when Penny moved in,
Speaker 2: it had just been used by like local kids for parties.
Speaker 2: Before then, the place was at the end of a
Speaker 2: dirt road, and instead of pain rent for the first
Speaker 2: several months or years or something, he fixed the place up.
Speaker 2: At first, it wasn't anything particularly radical, just a strange
Speaker 2: little place that he lived alongside eventually two of his
Speaker 2: coworkers from where he taught at that school. But in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy he quit that job and he wanted to
Speaker 2: do something more radical with the place. He wanted to
Speaker 2: build an open house. Later, he explained his dream like
Speaker 2: this quote. I love the idea of somewhere where people
Speaker 2: could stop to tell their story, with a comfortable bed
Speaker 2: for the night, and go on their journey. My original
Speaker 2: dream was that if I created one of those, then
Speaker 2: everyone who visited would go off and do something similar.
Speaker 2: Dial house gets called commune, or it gets called an
Speaker 2: arts community. He gets called a lot of things. It's
Speaker 2: an interesting model. Multiple things I've read said, like the
Speaker 2: dishes are usually clean there. I think people had to
Speaker 2: do their own dishes. The food was communal more or less.
Speaker 2: Anyone who wanted to come over could go into any
Speaker 2: room they wanted that wasn't a private bedroom. If you
Speaker 2: wanted food, you'd cook it, probably for everybody. So it's
Speaker 2: basically somewhere between a collective house, a commune, and a
Speaker 2: crash pad. And it's like not trash like a crash pad.
Speaker 2: It's not like everything for everyone totally all the time.
Speaker 2: No bedrooms like people assume communes are just seems nice.
Speaker 1: I wonder about the tradition of that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: in Europe and the UK, like like the like the
Speaker 1: idea of a pub is super interesting, and that a
Speaker 1: pub is a public house.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and I and I love learning about
Speaker 3: like and this is why I was reading Calvin and
Speaker 3: the Witch or this is what I was looking for
Speaker 3: in Calvin and the Witch. Is a history of the
Speaker 3: heretical movements, and a lot of them had these communal
Speaker 3: situations too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like these big like the begines, Okay.
Speaker 3: Like little little rumors that I've heard about them, these
Speaker 3: like collectivist traditions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I wonder. I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 2: For them, I wonder too, And I I think it's
Speaker 2: like a I think it's developed from hippie culture, but
Speaker 2: I'm not one hundred percent certain, but it is a
Speaker 2: kind of interesting spin on it, and I like the yeah,
Speaker 2: the comparison, like the public house kind of thing. His
Speaker 2: two roommates were like, well, I don't want to do that.
Speaker 2: I want to be able to write my name on
Speaker 2: my food. And so they moved out, and other folks
Speaker 2: moved in, supposedly without no one was like particularly upset
Speaker 2: by this one resident. His name is Dave King. Later
Speaker 2: he drew the crass logo, which if people haven't seen,
Speaker 2: it's worth seeing. Is not a visual medium. But honestly,
Speaker 2: I think the reason that Grass was successful is this logo. Like,
Speaker 2: I mean, they're a good band. Well, no, they're an
Speaker 2: interesting band, but they like they were branded really well,
Speaker 2: and the crass logo is a very successful and dramatic
Speaker 2: piece of symbolism. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Dave
Speaker 2: King said about the place, quote, what was very interesting
Speaker 2: to me was the atmosphere of timelessness that seemed to
Speaker 2: exist around the house. Seemed like the days could last forever,
Speaker 2: and being young, you maybe also stay up all night.
Speaker 2: There was a certain benign drift that would happen that
Speaker 2: I think is the potential source of mystical experiences. Essentially,
Speaker 2: he was saying that, like, even without drugs, there was
Speaker 2: a kind of altered reality experience of like leaving the city.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3: That reminds me of some of my friends' houses and
Speaker 3: some of my experiences of collective houses like that.
Speaker 1: It does have this feeling of being out of time. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Defining the sense of out of time is, uh, how
Speaker 1: do you do that too? Does it remind you of
Speaker 1: fairy tale? Like? What does what does that mean?
Speaker 2: It makes me think literally of like the concept of
Speaker 2: the land of fairy where time passes differently, years and
Speaker 2: years go by when you just spend one night in
Speaker 2: Faerry or the other way around. You know, like the
Speaker 2: idea that like you go to this other place and
Speaker 2: time just works differently. And I've experienced that basically in
Speaker 2: places kind of like this myself too in it. I
Speaker 2: love it.
Speaker 1: That's beautiful. I want to. I want to. I want
Speaker 1: the campfire ghost story version of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And in Dial House, one room became a music room,
Speaker 2: and soon enough people started making weird avant garde shit.
Speaker 2: The Dial House folks were part of this movement called Fluxus,
Speaker 2: which I am not an expert on. This is not
Speaker 2: an episode on Fluxus, but this is basically the avant
Speaker 2: garde movement. It is heavily inspired by our man, the
Speaker 2: gay anarchist John Cage. It's into making events rather than
Speaker 2: finished pieces. It's generally anti commercial. Sometimes it's like people
Speaker 2: kind of call it neo data. Yoko Ono is probably
Speaker 2: the most famous practitioner of this stuff today. And I
Speaker 2: was going to give a weird tangent about the time
Speaker 2: I ask you a question, but I'm not gonna do it.
Speaker 2: Ah that okay, wait, no, I should probably do Okay,
Speaker 2: So here's my weird tangent. So, when you were like
Speaker 2: a teenager, you went and saw the the John Cage exhibit,
Speaker 2: you know?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, when I was sixteen, I saw Yoko on a
Speaker 2: exhibit and I was not impressed. I was like, because
Speaker 2: it didn't to me, it didn't have much Like I
Speaker 2: was really into craft at the time, right, I was like,
Speaker 2: because I didn't know what I wanted to say as
Speaker 2: an artist, but I like really was like interested in
Speaker 2: like people like learning the craft really well.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like where's the chain mail?
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean like I mean like the like although
Speaker 2: that would have interested me definitely. I was definitely making
Speaker 2: chain oil at that point, but like, I mean the
Speaker 2: like technical expertise and shit, you know, yes. And on
Speaker 2: the wall there was like forty pictures of this blurry
Speaker 2: it's the same blurry photo of an eye, and then
Speaker 2: under each one it said like I remember this, and
Speaker 2: it was like different memories related to eyes, and the
Speaker 2: very first one said I remember when I was born
Speaker 2: and looking up into the doctor's eyes. And I thought
Speaker 2: to myself, yoko on as a liar, yoko and as
Speaker 2: a fraud. Fuck this right, so rude?
Speaker 1: Teenagers are so rude.
Speaker 2: I was like, there's no way this lady remembers being born.
Speaker 2: To hell with this, all of this is bullshit. That
Speaker 2: was what I walked away with. The person I went
Speaker 2: with was not impressed about my take on this. And
Speaker 2: then I was in arts school a couple of years
Speaker 2: later and Yoko Ono came and gave a talk, and
Speaker 2: I like waited in line to ask a question. I
Speaker 2: was like a young anarchist, and so everyone in the
Speaker 2: crowd is like, ah, fuck, this bitch is gonna ask
Speaker 2: some like fucking like shit about the World Trade Organization
Speaker 2: or something, you know, And I get up and I
Speaker 2: think I got her. I'm like, Yoko Ono, do you
Speaker 2: remember being born? Because in my mind, if she says yes,
Speaker 2: then she's lying, and if she says no, then she's lying, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: And Yoko Ono says, oh, that's such an interesting question.
Speaker 2: My first memories are reoccurring dreams of being born and
Speaker 2: looking into the doctor's eyes. And I was like, oh, fuck,
Speaker 2: yok Ona's legit. I'm an asshole.
Speaker 1: You are an asshole. That's real, sweet before you go.
Speaker 2: But I didn't. I didn't be like do you remember
Speaker 2: being born?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: I was just just like, hey, what what's up?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: And so yeah, that was how I got convinced that
Speaker 2: the art is real. Everything's fine, and so fluxus is
Speaker 2: the super arty stuff that drives the right wing mad.
Speaker 2: And also it didn't impress sixteen year old me. But
Speaker 2: now I think is really cool, and honestly, like some
Speaker 2: of the fluxus type stuff, it doesn't really impress me personally,
Speaker 2: or it's not it's not what I go for personally,
Speaker 2: but I I respect the shit out of it, and
Speaker 2: I love how much it triggers chuds, you know, and
Speaker 2: some of it creates incredible, amazing things. So I'm not
Speaker 2: whatever anyway, I swear I'm not a total philistine, just
Speaker 2: a slightly one. Now dial House the run a weird
Speaker 2: art people in their weird hippie house and four of
Speaker 2: them start an arty noise band called the Stanford Rivers
Speaker 2: Quartet with percussion, piano, keyboards, and flute and trombone, and
Speaker 2: they would do artsy shit that's really cool, honestly, like
Speaker 2: develop new styles of musical notation that were like visual art,
Speaker 2: and so if you paint with red lines and that
Speaker 2: it's up to the reader the musician to decide what
Speaker 2: the red means in terms of how they should inflect
Speaker 2: the notes as they play them and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Rad Yeah, no, I genuinely think it's kind of cool.
Speaker 2: And then they had an avant garde band called Exit
Speaker 2: after that, and this one lasted longer and it was
Speaker 2: a free jazz avant garde band and they named themselves
Speaker 2: after quote the direction they expected the audience to head
Speaker 2: in droves.
Speaker 1: That is one marker of the success of a band
Speaker 1: for sure. My friend Stephan Jikusco, he that was one
Speaker 1: of his markers and he's he's the main brains behind
Speaker 1: the Doughnut band that I referenced previous episode. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: yeah stuff And to Cusco, what a genius. I love
Speaker 1: that man. Yeah, and he's got his stuff on band
Speaker 1: camp that I would love to direct people to. The
Speaker 1: like noisy art stuff I was involved in to some
Speaker 1: degree as a child.
Speaker 2: And I remember like when I like when I started
Speaker 2: watching like art films and stuff. For a while, I
Speaker 2: was like, I don't really get it, like not even
Speaker 2: just like like experimental and abstract film. And then I realized,
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, the way I zone out to
Speaker 2: this stuff is different, and it kind of creates an
Speaker 2: altered like an altered reality experience. And then I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's the point. It's not just a narrative or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is the point. And I personally hate dissociating,
Speaker 1: so I have to. I have to. I want more
Speaker 1: exciting experimental music. I can't. I can't deal.
Speaker 3: With the like long, long, long, long, empty sort of
Speaker 3: like extremely slow shot kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: But one of my favorite ways that I've heard a
Speaker 1: lovely experimental musician describe the point of his work is
Speaker 1: that he considers himself a collaborator with nature. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's how he thinks about generating sound.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. When they created Exit, there's a few
Speaker 2: core members and anyone could come and go from the band,
Speaker 2: so I like they're collaborating into the space they're in.
Speaker 2: The audience when they play can come up on stage
Speaker 2: and join them. Often they start with like eight musicians
Speaker 2: and end up with eighteen musicians. And they played a
Speaker 2: lot of shows, especially like festival and weird art places
Speaker 2: for weird art crowds, and at shows they would hand
Speaker 2: out presents, art prints, packets of seeds as long as
Speaker 2: the audience gets something. They never charge admission, I believe once.
Speaker 2: And they always started an hour early before the set
Speaker 2: time on the which is this is where they this
Speaker 2: is how they punks learn from this to punk, we
Speaker 2: should need to put the punctual back in punk or something.
Speaker 2: They would start an hour early so that by the
Speaker 2: time the audience came in. They came into quote a
Speaker 2: musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence,
Speaker 2: so like the things already happening.
Speaker 1: Ooh, that's so beautiful that I know.
Speaker 2: And then they would play until they felt like stopping
Speaker 2: or the venue turned off the power. In nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: they threw an avant garde festival called Ices International Carnival
Speaker 2: of Experimental Sound, which was about two weeks long. Penny
Speaker 2: said about it, quote the great end not so great
Speaker 2: avant gardis worldwide came to it and performed mostly for nothing. Financially.
Speaker 2: It was a disaster, but it was a fantastic festival,
Speaker 2: really lovely. John Cage played at it, and one of
Speaker 2: the people who helped put it on. This is a
Speaker 2: complete side note. I just can't not put this in.
Speaker 2: A guy named Harvey Matso was a former FBI informant
Speaker 2: who testified before the House of un American Activities like
Speaker 2: he was like a communist who had turned on all
Speaker 2: of his friends until they found out he was actually
Speaker 2: an FBI informant the whole time, until he turned on
Speaker 2: the FBI, and he he turned trader and he helped
Speaker 2: bring down McCarthy and spent three years in prison, and
Speaker 2: then he moved to the UK because both in the US,
Speaker 2: both the like left wing people and the right wing
Speaker 2: people hated him and he just needed to get out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we need to make room for people to
Speaker 1: come back. I don't know. It's hard to trust. It's
Speaker 1: hard to trust a turncoats.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I know, I know you're like, I would
Speaker 2: hold this man at arm's length, thank him for what
Speaker 2: he did, be mad at him for other stuff he did.
Speaker 2: It's complicated, but then he helped organize this thing, so
Speaker 2: I love it. But Exit didn't last too much longer.
Speaker 2: And why it disbanded. Okay, so it disbanded in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two also, and it disbanded for kind of a
Speaker 2: cool reason. Penny realized that he was being seen as
Speaker 2: a guru. A lot of his students were joining the band,
Speaker 2: and he would often like take his students out to
Speaker 2: the woods to like make art by just building little
Speaker 2: houses for the fairies out of sticks or whatever, you know,
Speaker 2: And he was like, I want to keep teaching, I
Speaker 2: want to keep making music, but I'm not trying to
Speaker 2: be a fucking cult leader. Like I'm not trying to
Speaker 2: be weird about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so many cool bands from that time ended up
Speaker 3: getting really culty, Like the Amazing String Band got super.
Speaker 1: Cool, Okay, I believe it, Like yeah, they went scientologist.
Speaker 2: Oh fuck, And so I just like really appreciate that.
Speaker 2: He was like, no, I'm too anti Thiritearian for this,
Speaker 2: Like I'm not. That's not what I'm doing here, you know.
Speaker 1: It's dumb. Yeah, that was the That was the real
Speaker 1: season of CULTI bullshit. Yeah, I mean not that we're fully.
Speaker 2: Out of that, but uh, everything old is new again.
Speaker 1: I was those collective trance people were hard into.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I you know, you see how like stepping
Speaker 2: outside of mainstream society is very appealing for very good reasons,
Speaker 2: and that can absolutely get culty. You know, when you
Speaker 2: asked earlier if I was certain air hippies, I'm going
Speaker 2: to describe to you this next chunk of their life.
Speaker 2: Dial House kept going and a young man named Wally
Speaker 2: Hope started hanging around Penny Rimbau and a few other
Speaker 2: people swore that he could do magic. Like one summer
Speaker 2: day he said, hey, guys, check this out, and suddenly
Speaker 2: it started snowing and there's like multiple people saying that
Speaker 2: this happened, and other people are like, no, that didn't happen.
Speaker 2: Not who were there that day that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2: People in Crass have different opinions about this guy. He
Speaker 2: was a trust fund dropout and he had visions about
Speaker 2: an egalitarian society of sun worshippers who would live at Stonehenge,
Speaker 2: and it was going to start on Summer Solstice nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four. They were going to go and squat Stonehenge
Speaker 2: by having a music festival. Is how I know they're hippies?
Speaker 1: Oh real, Yeah.
Speaker 2: The poster read free Stonehenge off rocks off every Sunday forever.
Speaker 2: And then because they're like chill, they wrote all the
Speaker 2: people living near Stonehenge to give them a heads up
Speaker 2: that they were all about to move there and like
Speaker 2: become weird squatters on the land and so but here's
Speaker 2: the letter that they sent. I'm going to read the
Speaker 2: whole thing because I love it. On the road home,
Speaker 2: there's random capitalization on the road home. Sunday, Dear sir,
Speaker 2: with all well meaning respect, our Lord God and his
Speaker 2: son Jesus Christ have ordained a spiritual pilgrimage to Stonehenge
Speaker 2: on twentieth June twenty first, et cetera. To fulfill the
Speaker 2: two commandments, Love God, love your neighbor. You are and
Speaker 2: will be our neighbor. We beg for help, friendship, and trust.
Speaker 2: If the gathering is overflowing big, we will give you
Speaker 2: any help you need, but you might us respect. We
Speaker 2: are to God's law and trying to balance the violence,
Speaker 2: corruption ensuing Third World War, oily energy crisis to manual
Speaker 2: communal farming, love, peace and freedom, your best mate, Wally,
Speaker 2: help for the kids?
Speaker 1: X my goodness, Yeah, how's that going to go over? Till?
Speaker 1: These like rural I don't know country people out there.
Speaker 2: So I don't know as much about what the actual
Speaker 2: farmers made of this, but I do know what happened.
Speaker 2: More broadly, a few hundred people showed up the UK's
Speaker 2: first synth duo Zorch was the only band that played
Speaker 2: Oh my God, and some folks stuck around for a
Speaker 2: while after the festival and squatted. Their goal was to
Speaker 2: lasten to a winter solstice, and everyone who was there
Speaker 2: changed their name to like Wally something that's not Culty, No,
Speaker 2: not at all, and then they basically just like a
Speaker 2: journalist was there and was like, look, they all just
Speaker 2: like sat around and ate terrible food that they didn't
Speaker 2: know how to cook, and they did drugs, and they
Speaker 2: talked about lay lines and pyramids, and they were eventually
Speaker 2: arrested and kicked out. The journalist was not impressed. Dear listener,
Speaker 2: I am not either, but whatever, more power to them. Likewise, Wally,
Speaker 2: the original Wally, decided that there should be another one
Speaker 2: of these festivals. But he was arrested at a squat
Speaker 2: for possession of LSD, and then when he took him
Speaker 2: to the prison, he refused to wear the prison uniform
Speaker 2: because they said it gave him a rash, so they
Speaker 2: threw him into a mental hospital where they told him
Speaker 2: that he was schizophrenic and they locked him up for
Speaker 2: a while. The second festival actually happened without him. They
Speaker 2: actually kept happening until they were shut down violently in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five. Thousands of people came there and there
Speaker 2: were two stages. Joe Strummer, later of the Clash, played
Speaker 2: with a band called the one oh one Ers and
Speaker 2: Dial House. People honestly didn't really think much of the festival.
Speaker 2: They were annoyed at the rich hippies pretending to be
Speaker 2: Native Americans and like living in tepees and real and
Speaker 2: on from stage called Penny and undercover cop. I think
Speaker 2: because he like didn't look enough like a hippie or whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, while he was too in custody to attend
Speaker 2: the second festival, and he never saw the ones that
Speaker 2: came after it either, because he died. It was ruled
Speaker 2: as suicide, and it was probably suicide in its way,
Speaker 2: but Penny was convinced for years that he'd been murdered,
Speaker 2: not just done in by the horrors of nineteen seventies
Speaker 2: met mental institutions, but straight up murdered and covered up
Speaker 2: by the police. Penny was kind of having a rough
Speaker 2: time around then. This would be the Long Dark Night
Speaker 2: of the Soul moment in the movie. Gee had just
Speaker 2: moved to New York and they broke up and they
Speaker 2: actually I think this is really sweet and pretty feminist.
Speaker 2: They had a divorce even though they didn't get married. Wow,
Speaker 2: and they're like gonna be friends and co collaborators to
Speaker 2: this day, Like they're both still alive. If you're listening,
Speaker 2: I hope I did this right, and I'm sure I didn't.
Speaker 2: There's so much written about you all. There's so much. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Penny was drinking heavily and a lot of his like
Speaker 2: peaceful hippie outlook was getting replaced by the fear of
Speaker 2: repression by the state because he was like, they just
Speaker 2: killed my friend, right, and he was investigating his friend's death,
Speaker 2: and the cops would tell him like hey, They would
Speaker 2: like pop by and be like, hey, you need to stop.
Speaker 2: You need to stop investigating this death. And so he
Speaker 2: wrote a whole book with all of his evidence called
Speaker 2: Homage to Catatonia, which is a sick pun on the
Speaker 2: Homage to Catalonia. Absolutely, he later burned it. It was
Speaker 2: never published that I can tell. There's multiple other people
Speaker 2: who have used this title for other things over the years.
Speaker 2: But and then another Wally, like another person from the
Speaker 2: Stonehenge encampment, was murdered, probably by like local rednecks. Basically
Speaker 2: he was tied to a tree with a joint in
Speaker 2: his hand. It was like an anti hippie murder. Probably. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these days, Penny is less sure that the original Wally
Speaker 2: was murdered directly so much as killed by the heart
Speaker 2: of the medical system.
Speaker 1: It's really creepy that the cops kept coming around and
Speaker 1: saying stop looking look into this. I mean, that's those
Speaker 1: are red flags right there.
Speaker 2: I know absolutely, you know. And when I say he's
Speaker 2: less short, I mean he's less short, not he is short,
Speaker 2: you know, like just it's a to many people, it's
Speaker 2: an open question. But in some ways an arcopunk was
Speaker 2: born from the innocence of the hippies being bashed up
Speaker 2: against the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems,
Speaker 2: and they saw themselves as a response to the failure
Speaker 2: of the hippie movement to fundamentally change society. Dialhouse started
Speaker 2: realizing society wasn't changing. Things were getting worse. Penny Rimbo,
Speaker 2: in his book The Last of the Hippies wrote, Oh,
Speaker 2: that's the other reason I can call him a hippie.
Speaker 2: He wrote, Society, the state in the system hadn't fucked off.
Speaker 2: They'd not only stayed right they were they'd grown stronger. Slowly,
Speaker 2: as people woke up to the fact that turning on
Speaker 2: was turning off and dropping out was copying out, the
Speaker 2: horrific reality of the nuclear world forced its way back
Speaker 2: through the escapist blur of those psychedelic dreams. The dream
Speaker 2: had been that if you created your own life independent
Speaker 2: of the system, the system would leave you to it.
Speaker 2: Looking back on it now, it seems pathetically naive, but
Speaker 2: for maybe fifteen years it had sustained the lives of
Speaker 2: thousands of people. The ultimate failure of the hippie was
Speaker 2: exactly the ostrich like approach to life. A hippie utopia
Speaker 2: surrounded by a world of hate and war was like
Speaker 2: snow before the summer sun.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean I always think about how mindfulness was used
Speaker 3: by the Japanese military.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have like conversations a lot with one of
Speaker 2: my therapist friends about, like, I love cognitive behavioral therapy
Speaker 2: and the ability to brainwash yourself like gotten me it's
Speaker 2: it's probably saved my life. But my therapist friend, a
Speaker 2: different one than the one you taught me cognit behavioral
Speaker 2: therapy was like, but it gets used to get people
Speaker 2: to accept things that they shouldn't accept.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as a tool.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And Penny also wrote quote, I think people like
Speaker 2: Jagger and Bowie stole our hopes and turned them into money.
Speaker 2: Their castles are built on our money, the movement's money.
Speaker 2: Bowie could have done something, but he didn't do anything.
Speaker 3: I'm friends with somebody who played drums with Bowie.
Speaker 1: For years. Oh shit, And he said like that man
Speaker 1: was obsessed with money, and I thought, I think to myself, like,
Speaker 1: all right, you're lucky.
Speaker 3: You're a drummer. You get paid as a band leader.
Speaker 3: This is my defense of Bowie.
Speaker 1: In that moment. I was like, you have to be yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is hard to pay a band and be on
Speaker 1: the road, and it's like one of the most expensive
Speaker 1: small businesses you can run is a band. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I appreciate what he's saying about Bowie collectively. Is is
Speaker 1: that like in response and you know, in relation to
Speaker 1: the collective dreams. It's like this man wove some beautiful
Speaker 1: spells that a lot of people responded to. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he's just an artist.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: And it's funny because like if you read different people
Speaker 2: in Crass talking about Bowie, Penny fucking hates Bowie, right,
Speaker 2: but like Steve Ignorant is like, oh no, yeah, I
Speaker 2: really like Bowie, like you know, did a lot for
Speaker 2: like being able to dress up like a freak. And
Speaker 2: you know, it's like and you just have like people
Speaker 2: have different thoughts about him, but the thing you're saying
Speaker 2: about like yeah, like yeah, as a band leader, you
Speaker 2: have to be obsessed with money. Someone needs to make
Speaker 2: sure that people get paid. And I think, what's so funny.
Speaker 2: We'll probably talk about this more like in future episodes too,
Speaker 2: but like, you know, you have this like, oh, we're
Speaker 2: all going to become rock stars and become millionaires off
Speaker 2: the back of everyone who buys their stuff, and then
Speaker 2: you have this reaction and an arcopunk is absolutely reaction,
Speaker 2: and they're like, we won't get rich, you know they do,
Speaker 2: Like I think that they're like eating some food, right,
Speaker 2: but they are like really sticking to their guns about
Speaker 2: keeping their products cheap, their shows, like you know they are.
Speaker 2: They stay earnest their entire lives to this, right, And
Speaker 2: then so you end up with this like in order
Speaker 2: to be an activist you have to volunteer for it
Speaker 2: kind of attitude for decades and in the past like
Speaker 2: ten fifteen years, that's starting to break and people are
Speaker 2: starting to as what we were saying earlier, being these
Speaker 2: two ideas can be in conversation with each other, Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you have your initial idea, fuck ya get rich, and
Speaker 2: then you have your other idea like, no, you must
Speaker 2: live like a monk to have good politics. And then
Speaker 2: also in a society with good social services, and then
Speaker 2: you have people being like, oh, that critique is really valid,
Speaker 2: but I need to get paid in order to do this.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a job. It's a really hard job.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and most people need jobs. But what did
Speaker 2: we're actually at the end of this episode what they
Speaker 2: do instead of being hippies forever. You already know, they
Speaker 2: become crass and they change the world. But how exactly
Speaker 2: it happens we're going to talk about next week. But
Speaker 2: first we're going to talk about how people can support
Speaker 2: you with your job of making music or just listen
Speaker 2: to the music, or do whatever else you want people
Speaker 2: to do besides starting a cult. You're not allowed to
Speaker 2: start a cult.
Speaker 1: No, I don't. I was raised in a cult. That's
Speaker 1: why I was a homeless teenager.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, cool, I was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was brought up in a stupid fundamentalist religious
Speaker 1: group and that's why I was on the street. But
Speaker 1: my shop is open whenever I'm not on tour, and
Speaker 1: that's a Jollihand music dot com or come see me.
Speaker 2: On tour a touring anytime soon.
Speaker 1: I'm mostly playing private shows up the West Coast and
Speaker 1: then I have a show March sixth in Bellingham at
Speaker 1: the odd Fellows, and I'm playing Chicago at Constellation on
Speaker 1: March fifteenth, so y'all come see me. Oh yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: going to play. I'm going to play with my friend's
Speaker 1: health and Beauty in Chicago. It's going to be great.
Speaker 2: And if people want Julie's merch, it is beautiful. Like
Speaker 2: I don't frame every random show or music related thing
Speaker 2: that I get, and.
Speaker 1: I'm so honored, thank you. And that illustration is by
Speaker 1: Jack Follows, who's a really gorgeous non binary anarchist game
Speaker 1: designer who you should follow on Patreon.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, and uh, for my own plugs, I already
Speaker 2: plugged that. I have a book. It's a book. It's
Speaker 2: called The Immortal Choir holds every voice. And I also
Speaker 2: have a substack, and all the important posts are free,
Speaker 2: and all of the posts that are more personal, some
Speaker 2: of the posts that are more personal or behind a paywall,
Speaker 2: and you can follow me there on whatever level of
Speaker 2: free or not free you feel like. And also, I
Speaker 2: don't know, times are hard, but we can take care
Speaker 2: of each other. That's my plug, take care of each other.
Speaker 2: We're gonna mostly get through this, most of us, and
Speaker 2: that's the way it always is going to be, because
Speaker 2: none of us were getting out of this is a
Speaker 2: live thing. When you're alive, you're guaranteed to die. That's
Speaker 2: what keeps me happy. Why am I rambling? I need
Speaker 2: to go eat food, but I will see you all
Speaker 2: next week.
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