RISE OF THE HIPPIESTER
The Wild And Magic Saga Of The New Cultural
Cannibals And Spiritual Shamans
On the morning of Wednesday April 30th, I took a cab to Sara Cline’s
Spanish hacienda-style home in the artsy Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz.
She and several members of the collective of creators and directors called The
Masses were eating breakfast surrounded by boxes of clothes, bags full of
cameras and cases of alcohol. Carefully packaged photos and paintings by
artists of The Masses were sitting on the steps ready for departure. These
people and things were about to embark on a twenty-hour road trip to a
one-horse town called Marfa located in the high desert of Far West Texas.
We were going on a journey to the heart of one of the most significant cultural
phenomena of the new millennium.
The real mystery was how we were going to get there. Alex Ebert, member of
The Masses and frontman of the thirteen-piece band Edward Sharpe and the
Magnetic Zeros, had decided to take care of transportation by impulsively
buying a vintage tour bus online over the weekend.
According to rumor, the forty feet long, eight feet wide 1984 American
Eagle 10 neared half a million miles and promised to bring us to Marfa in style, if it actually managed to make the
journey.
An unfortunate mechanic was charged with the impossible task of making the
bus road-ready in two days. He never even got the chance to fix its oil leak
and ignition issues, not to mention the broken fuel gage and odometer. We were
essentially going to be playing Russian roulette on wheels.
At about midday, with over three hours of delay, everyone was certain the
bus had passed on to the Great Beyond. To our surprise, we heard the
providential clanking and growling of our divine chariot descending from the
heavens. An old greyhound bus appeared at the bottom of the hill and struggled
up the street before landing in our driveway like a beached whale.
The tall, pale and lanky Ebert came out of the bus like a Heroin Bedouin in
nouveau desert native apparel: a
white Afghan kurta, with skinny white jeans and a straw hat
that covered coiled Shiva hair. “Hey guys, sorry it took so long,” he said in a soft-spoken voice. “We had
to go to Burbank to get biodiesel fuel. My friend’s company makes it there from
used cooking oil and we ran into the worst traffic. The bus is looking good
though. It’ll be a nice ride if it doesn’t break down on the way!”
I climbed in and discovered the interior was gutted of its seats and
redecorated with an assortment of quilts with flower patterns and handmade
Mexican rugs in every color of the rainbow. A living plant hung from the
ceiling next to a calendar from 1969 while various New Age books were spread
around the room, including Human Aura by Kuthumi Djwal Kul and an essay about reincarnation
and past life regression called The
Eternal Dance. The result looked
like a cross between an Indian teepee and a Berkeley sit-in.
Ebert and his girlfriend Jade Castrinos, a beautiful green-eyed,
olive-skinned girl, gave me the “house tour.”
“I got this blanket in Mexico because of its color purple,” she explained
in her Bohemian dress. “Purple is the color of the aura that clears your karma.
If you take a karma photo while focusing on that color, it will actually appear
in that photo.”
“I was actually reading about the violet flame last night and harnessing
the source of forever energy for this trip,” said Ebert. “I removed rubbish off
the bus through the early morning with the help of some of the other guys in
the band, Tay Tay, Orpheo, Josh, Christian, Peter, Nico, and JJ. We put in blankets and twin beds and rugs and
drilled down this nifty thrift table born for its position.”
The bus filled with a traveling circus of twenty
odd musicians, filmmakers and artists of The Masses including a wildlife
photographer, several professional swing dancers and the majority of Edward
Sharpe. Two of the most popular and free-spirited mainstays of the Los Angeles
scene were also there on assignment for the vintage t-shirt company Alternative
Apparel and more importantly themselves, photographer Ashley Haber and creative
director Petecia Le Fawnhawk. Finally, the music editor of the LA Weekly,
Randall Roberts, was on board researching what would become a wonderful cover
article about our trip.
The last person to climb in was a big, bald and toothless
Caucasian Male in baggie jean shorts who introduced himself as “Corn-Fed.” It
was the driver Ebert had found through a Craig’s List posting made the previous
night. Corn-Fed took a look around and let a deep belly laugh escape through
his bright pink gums. The driver was as
taken aback by his passengers as they were by him.
Corn-Fed sat at the giant wheel in front of a
dashboard full of broken gizmos and laboriously tried to start the engine.
The bus put-put-puttered for a few silent minutes
and…
VARRRRRRRRRROOOOOOM!!!
We were off in a cloud of fried chicken-smelling
biofuel smoke on a ride to Marfa. The bus and its strange driver and passengers
were heading East and were ready to take over the rest of country.
***
Lost amidst a stark landscape and naked horizon, Marfa had only recently popped on the general population’s radars. The hamlet of 2203 residents rose to national prominence when it became the barren setting for Oscar-winners No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Inspired by this recent success, organizers planned a film festival in Marfa and invited The Masses to present their music videos and artworks. This was an important trip for them as they were still reeling from the death of their friend, collaborator and benefactor, the Australian actor Heath Ledger.
As few people know, Ledger was working with The Masses to become a
filmmaker. He made impressive stabs at directing by way of music videos and
already showed signs of great talent. He authored two beautiful, highly stylized
videos for Ben Harper, among others, and was developing several projects by the
time of his accidental overdose.
Director Matt Amato and creative director Jon Ramos founded The Masses in
2002 to create an environment where individuals with highly diverse interests
could unite their talents and develop original ways of bringing together art,
music and film. In 2006, Ledger, who was roommates with Amato when he first
moved to the USA, decided to invest money in the collective to help his friends
develop their projects and cultivate his skills as a director. The Masses had
been a powerhouse of creativity, but with Ledger’s high profile and energy it
became a full-fledged independent film and music company.
“Heath threw himself
completely into everything that he did,” Sara Cline told me. “He didn’t stop
until he ran himself into the ground. Even when shooting videos he was an
animal. He was the first one to show up. He was up at dawn and did not stop
during the entire day. He wanted to do everything. He was a very physical
person, very fluid and constantly moving. It was like you were watching an
athlete with the camera. He was a complete force of nature.”
Cline, who was the executive producer of The Masses, said this with neither
sorrow nor regret as we drove past the Hollywood sign and onto the freeway. She
seemed to have worked through her feelings of grief and was resolved to
celebrate, rather than mourn, the fact that she had known Ledger during the
last years of his life.
With this mindset, Cline hoped the first Marfa Film Festival would not only
give The Masses a chance to showcase their work, but also help them renew a
sense of purpose after starting their year in heartache.
It was now a little over three months since Ledger’s accidental overdose and
the collective was doing its best to live on. If its members carried any kind
of latent sadness it was sublimated by the anticipation of invading small-town
Texas with an armada of artists.
***
A bottle of whiskey was passed around the bus-- a pretty decent poison called “Dickey” that became the source of more than a few low-brow jokes along the way. I shared a drink with the members of Edward Sharpe and recognized some of the greatest musicians in Los Angeles: players of popular local acts such as The Airborne Toxic Event, Sugarcult, Dawes, Amnion, and Fool’s Gold who had taken time away from their bands to help Ebert with his new project.
Before creating Edward Sharpe, Ebert had originally made his mark on the LA
scene through his rock band Ima Robot. With his shaved asymmetrical haircut and
electroclash androgyny, Ebert had embodied his band’s glam punk image. For a
while Ima Robot was billed as The Next Big Thing thanks to his electric stage
presence and eccentric dress style. Roman Coppola directed
one of his emblematic low-tech videos for their song “Dynomite” and they soon found themselves touring with bands like Hot
Hot Heat, The Von Bondies, and She Wants Revenge.
Ima Robot’s first album caught the attention of Virgin Records
who signed them and released their second record. “The album
was so tastelessly commercial that I decided to call it Monument to the Masses as a confession,” Ebert told me. Ironically, the title referred
less to the name of his collective than to the belief that he had sold out. The
Monument to the Masses took the airs of a headstone. It was completely
overproduced and, ultimately, it flopped.
In 2007, Ima Robot won its independence from Virgin Records and Ebert
embarked on
a mega soul-searching mission. The next
time I saw him, he had changed from andro-genius to Jesus. His hair was straight and long and he was
owning the Troubadour stage while surrounded by an exuberant band of musicians that played everything from the trumpet, to the piano,
guitar, tambourines, maracas and violin.
Ebert carried an almost messianic aura as he
and his ecstatic twelve band mates performed
an epic fusion of folk,
mariachi, and psychedelic rock. The result
looked like a Spaghetti Western
version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last
Supper.
It was Edward Sharpe’s first show.
Well actually the first with the full band. Ebert had had a little shindig
at the Hotel Café where he brought a cactus on stage and wore a
Mexican blanket as a poncho. Jade Castrinos, who was at this point only friends
with Ebert, joined him on a few songs and forces greater than music got hold of
them. “We started
dating that night,” Ebert told me. “It became really in our face,
unavoidable. LA is all tight-lipped
posers, you know what I mean, and she was just smiling and running all over the
place. Her energy was BLAM everywhere. I’d never seen anything like that.”
***
It was around this time that Sara Cline called me to talk about Alex Ebert’s attempts to revive Laurel Canyon’s crazed rock scene.
During the height of the hippie era, Laurel Canyon rivaled Haight-Ashberry as a Mecca for the Sixties’ counter-culture thanks to its wonderfully lush natural setting. While it lied only
a few minutes from the bustling Sunset Strip, the rustic canyon in the heart of
LA possessed a luxuriant wildlife and vegetation that suited the hippie desire
to evade the materialism of American consumer culture and retreat into an
isolated verdant atmosphere. It had thus become the home of the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas,
Crosby Stills and Nash, The Eagles, Jim Morrison and a host of other musicians.
Laurel
Canyon had since been taken over y Hollywood executives and faux-hemian millionaires. Ebert wanted to resurrect its legacy. He
rented Frank Zappa’s old property at
the corner of Lookout Mountain and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. “It was the absolute center of the Laurel Canyon
movement when Zappa lived there,” he told me.
Although the old log cabin burned-down in the Eighties, there was still a
Flintstones-like tree house surrounded by a vast property with a goldfish pond
and a shamanic hermit cave hidden on the hillside.
I was invited to the first of many parties aiming to reclaim the canyon.
Edward Sharpe was set up around a bonfire on the hillside. The enormous front
yard was packed with guys in Old West hats and vests and girls wearing scarves,
Indian feathers, flowing dresses, and flowers in their hair. The band performed
under the stars as the folksy crowd laughed and danced barefoot in the
grass. Fairy-like apparitions
ringed-around-the-rosy with their hair floating in the wind while enchanted
couples ran around the property kissing and holding hands. If this wasn’t the Summer of Love it sure as
hell looked like it.
Yet a second glance gave me a more nuanced picture. While
most people qualified as “hippies,” they didn’t correspond to the gross image I
had of them. Here were hippies I could talk to without wanting to take a
shower. Struggling within this rural lovefest were a few hardline hipsters who
did their desperate best to stick to their urban cool. The most daring of them
tried to adjust by rolling their tight jeans up to dip their feet in the pond
without getting their clothes wet. They, who had been controlling the
avant-garde for so long, were clearly at a loss. The hipsters were no longer
hip and I was possibly the unhipest hipster of them all.
“Folk yeah!” I exclaimed to a friend. “This party is folking awesome.”
“What the folk are you
talking about?” he asked. “This place is a folkin’ joke.”
“You’re a folking
joke, folkface. Look around for a
sec. It’s unfolking believable!”
As a hipster I was
very far removed from the hippie pantheon. If anything I had grown in direct
opposition to it. I saw myself living in the legacy of great disruptors of the
status quo and I realized that the majority of my interests were based on
hate. Hatred of boredom, of rules, of
the conventional and the accepted.
This party on the other hand was full of love. There was so much love in
the air I could almost club a seal. A stunning blonde girl with a strand of
pink Day-Glo hair skipped over to me just to prove my point.
“Hi,” she said. She pronounced the word like she was singing it, letting
the “i” sound swell and trail off the way little girls do. HiiiiiIIIIiiii.
“Hi,” I lied.
“You’re beautiful,” she said while playing with my hair. It was shaved in
the shape of a lobotomy scar on the left side -- just to project the image of
insanity.
“You’re beautifuller,” I answered noticing two small red hearts painted on
each of her freckly cheeks.
“What’s your zodiac sign?” she asked.
Under any other circumstance the question would make me want to vomit, but
for some reason I decided to go along with it.
“February 17,” I answered. “I’m the biggest Aquarius ever.”
“No way??? That’s a great sign,” she
exclaimed.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’m extremely creative and completely disorganized.
Also, I’m a great lover. How ‘bout you?”
“I’m a Leo,” she said with a coy smile.
“I knew it. All my ex-girlfriends are Leo. Mars is in Gemini so now’s not a
good time but give me your number and I’ll call you when the North and South
Nodes change signs.”
I pulled out my cell phone to enter her digits and she pulled out hers to
enter mine. She then hugged me like I was her favorite person in the world. I
once heard human beings could not be hugged for more than a few seconds without
developing a form of emotional attachment. That thought trailed in my mind
while we stood steadfast in each other’s arms and my composure slowly melted.
She finally let go and skipped off but stopped ten feet away and turned back.
“I love you,” she said.
Promoter David Heath, who was standing next to me,
smiled and rolled his eyes.
“I’m sorry, but that has to be my biggest new pet peeve in Los Angeles,” he
said. “Every time I meet someone now it’s ‘I looove you… I looove you
SO MUCH.’ Come on! How can these girls love me when they barely
know me? I should start putting them to
the test. The next time a girl tells me that she loves me, I’ll just act
completely dumbfounded. ‘You love
me? Wow. I... I don’t know how to
respond. This is the greatest moment of my life!’ Maybe it will make her feel awkward enough
that she’ll think twice about taking love so lightly.”
“Yeah, love is so gay,” I agreed.
Yet Heath and I both knew deep inside that we were fooling ourselves. Our
cynical irony had suddenly appeared for what it was, the shell of dated hipster
habits.
“You know what,” I told him. “I
never thought I’d say something this cheesy, but… we need more love in this
world. ”
Maybe it was the sight of that blondie so stoked about life, maybe it was
the tequila, I don’t know what it was, but, for the time being at least, I
wanted to give in to this lovefest. Right before my eyes, I could see hipsters
and hippies merging into one. There, singing in the grass to prove it, was Alex
Ebert, the glam punk rebel turned New Age guru.
***
Back at Flaunt
Magazine’s offices, I told the new editor-in-chief, Andrew Pogany, about my
experience. He and I had been trying to get a grasp of this rising cultural
tide taking over Los Angeles during many after hours tête-à-têtes.
“It’s a whole new thing, man,” I told him. “They’re not
hippies, but they’re not hipsters either. It’s a combination of both.”
“Aha. They’re hippiesters
then,” he joked.
“Yeah I guess you could call them that,” I laughed.
The hippiesters. Hipsters with a spiritual conscience. Hippies 2.0.
Hipsters post irony. Hippies post cheese. Hipsters who live in nature. Hippies
who live online. Hipsters who expand their minds. Hippies who don’t smell and
dress well. Hipsters with veggie oil cars who listen to folk music and go to
Burning Man. Hippies with skinny jeans who listen to electro and go to trendy
clubs. Hipsters who aren’t afraid to believe in love, the occult and the
pursuit of happiness. Hippies who aren’t afraid to dismiss New Age bullshit,
conspiracy theories and Birkenstocks.
Hipsters who make fun of hippies. Hippies who make fun of hipsters.
Hipsters who are hippies. Hippies who are hipsters.
Hippiesters.
***
Andrew Pogany decided to celebrate the cultural shift from hipster cynicism
to hippiester spirituality. He courageously ran a story about a
long forgotten Age of Aquarius cult known as The Source. Nobody in their right
mind would praise a cult today -- especially one whose leader, Father Yod, was
an accused murderer who lived in Laurel Canyon, was chauffeured in a Rolls
Royce and had thirteen wives by the time he died in a hand-gliding accident.
(You can’t invent this stuff). Yet Pogany wanted to draw attention to The
Source’s mystical explorations of the cosmos.
According to Jodi Wille, the publisher of The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and
The Source Family:
“The Family was full of beautiful, idealistic young people
who were fed up with the materialist death trap of American culture and
believed they could build a better world, one more deeply connected to mind,
body, spirit, and nature. This desire, this urgent need for personal and
cultural transformation, is very timely. We can learn from the successes and
failures of groups like The Source in our own search for a better world.”
Pogany helped Wille
organize the first public appearance of Father Yod’s psychedelic band in thirty
years, Ya Ho Wa 13. The event was held at the Echoplex and included
performances by the seminal Sixties garage rock band Sky Saxon and The Seeds.
Playing on the same bill as the countercultural giants were Hecuba and The
Entrance Band who were there to represent Los Angeles’ new generation of
experimental music. The night promised to be absolutely insane.
I went hoping to see
how LA’s hippiesterati would respond to individuals who had given away all
their material possessions to join a commune centered on spiritual
enlightenment. Would they be met with hipster cynicism or hippie enthusiasm? It seemed to me like this was the test.
I got there right at
the beginning of Hecuba’s jaw-dropping show. The lead singer, Isabelle
Albuquerque, was performing disembodied dance moves in a black and green body
suit while singing the musical equivalent of an alien abduction of David Byrne.
The venue had been
entirely redecorated for the night. The
walls were covered with old Source Family posters and the floor was carpeted
with an enormous fluffy white rug to lounge around. Source Family members who had
rejoined civilian life after Father Yod’s death came wearing robes and the
entire Flaunt staff was dressed in kaftans with
scorpion and skull emblems. The Entrance Band commenced its
mind-blowing psychedelic rock set and audience-members got neck rubs from massage
therapists as visionary frontman Guy
Blakeslee was slaying it with monstrous guitar
solos.
Ya Ho Wa 13’s
performance began when an old bearded Aquarian
dragged giant balls into the crowd and started juggling them. He was the
Family mime and was apparently illustrating the fragile balance between
darkness and light. A tall man with a long white
beard dressed in a flowing white robe with a black belt at the waste got on
stage. His Source name was Electricity Aquarian. He asked the audience to join
him in an ancient white magic ritual known as the “star exercise.”
“This
is gonna be better than any old orgasm,” he said. “Stand with your legs spread
apart and stretch your arms out on a level with your shoulders. Turn the palm
of your left hand up and your right palm down. The left hand receives the
Universal Life Energy which is cascading from Outer Space! Say this affirmation, ‘I am one with the
Universal Life Energy. It is flowing through me now.’”
Everyone
followed his directions and repeated the words.
“Now
inhale and exhale through your nose a hundred and eight times as deeply and
quickly as you can. We are going to generate the basic
energy force of life with the ‘Breath of Fire.’”
I
sucked in the air as swiftly as I could -- but accidentally began to choke. The
whole room was breathing furiously so I had to go extra fast to catch up. By my
thirtieth breath I was still not feeling anything, by the sixtieth I was
feeling exhausted and by my last breath I was so high I could touch the sky. Ya
Ho Wa 13 then began its set with Djin playing the guitar, Sunflower on bass,
and Octavius on drums. A cloud of mysticism shrouded the Echoplex as the band
became absorbed in a combination of folkie fervor, tribal droning, and ecstatic
chants. From the first hit of the ritual gong, I was ready to say goodbye to my life on Earth
and launch into space.
***
The next day I emailed
Flaunt’s music editor.
“Where were you last
night?” I asked. “I think an Aquarian vortex prevented us from reaching
interplanetary hyperconsciousness.”
“Didn't you see me?”
he asked. “I was at the front of the stage fucking the universe (F.Y.I. she's a
filthy whore!).”
“You’re so Gaia,” I
answered. “And you don’t even know it.”
Despite a dose of playful skepticism, it was evident that the LA scene was delving
deep into spirituality. I became intrigued by esoteric mysticism and decided to
go to the source of The Source. I contacted Sky Saxon through his Myspace
profile. Apparently, it’s the easiest way to meet a legendary Sixties
proto-guru rockstar with a cult following. Our email conversation was pretty
epic.
“What
could people from a younger generation that has not lived through the 60's and
70's learn from The Source?” I asked.
“Everyone
learned love and everyone learned we are all connected. I think the great
learning really came from taking LSD, which I called Love Special Delivery. The
government had it first to mind-control the people. Timothy Leary got it and
used it to work with people as a psychiatrist tool to help people free
themselves for anything that had dragged them down because when taking LSD, and
I believe everyone should take it at least once, you realize that you are the
son or daughter of God for sure but when the acid runs down you go back to
being mortal again and your high aspirations of saving the earth and its
creation are usually pushed aside for greed which is really sad because that
consciousness that you had when taking LSD is truly who you are.
“You
are all truly Gods and Goddesses on this planet Earth and that was the mission
of the Source to turn the women into Goddesses and the men into Gods for if you
can become this on Earth then you can go to a higher station in another world.”
Perhaps
Saxon had Love Special Delivered a little too frequently, yet he, like most members
of The Source, recalled his experience with joy. “It was the greatest time of
my life,” he said. “We always had what we needed because Father, not only being
a spiritual father, cared about each and every one of us and none of us lacked
for anything whether it was food, clothing, musical instruments, or any
consciousness.”
***
I
got in touch with Guy Blakeslee, head of The Entrance Band, to see what he
retained of his experience performing with Sky Saxon and Ya Ho Wa 13. “I
really felt a higher vibration in the crowd and the performances,” he said,
“and the sense that many generations of seekers and creative people were
joining their energy together in a really beautiful way. For me, music, and
especially singing, are the most spiritual things I have found in my life and I
have continued to practice music and singing as a spiritual discipline. Through
an energy shift I induce in myself, I have found the ability to channel powers
far beyond my waking understanding while in a musical trance.
“I
learned a lot from The Source’s story and from meeting them and playing with
them. But a lot of what I learned was that within myself I am averse to groups
and leaders and rules and dogmas and that if the best parts of what the Source
Family teaches and practices is to have any benefit to the present youth and
future generations it will have to be presented as a journey that we all go on
in our own way. The time for ‘Fathers’ and Gurus is really behind us now I
think.”
I could only hope that Blakeslee
was right. If our generation was going to delve back into spirituality, it
better learn from the mistakes of the past.
***
Blakeslee wanted to
expand his audience’s consciousness but he knew that each person had to start
the journey from within. He lived in Laurel Canyon with his
girlfriend, filmmaker Maximilla Lukacs,
and his drummer, Derek James, in an A-frame house from the Thirties with floor
to ceiling windows in the front.
He invited
me over to a party for Lukacs’ birthday. I
entered the house through a weathered wooden deck that was falling apart. An
embroidered white sheet was stretched against the window to serve as a screen,
on which were projected videos of colored liquids melting into each other.
A raging dance party
was going on inside a candle-lit pyramid-shaped room. I made my way through the
crowd to find Blakeslee preparing hot figs
with honey in the kitchen. He wore round-rimmed glasses and an American
Flag-patterned vest. With his gaunt square jaw and long dark hair, he looked
like a Sixties’ version of Daniel Day Lewis playing Bill the Butcher. He
greeted me and pulled out of his pocket a bottle of lavender aromatherapy oil,
which he used to perfume the room with its invigorating smell.
Mildly high off the
fragrance of “Lavender Spike,” I walked over to Lukacs who was laughing and
dancing in the high-ceilinged living room. From her neck hung a handmade
leather satchel in which she carried a variety of crystals. “Feel their
energy,” she told me, putting two in my hand. “They’re amazingly powerful. You
know, I am a big fan of the Tarot. I use the Crowley deck and crystals to
practice divination when I want to check in with the higher forces at work.”
Lukacs was surrounded
by a jovial crew of hippiesters dressed in ragamuffin vintage styles that
seemed to borrow from every major decade of the past century. Becky Stark, the
lead singer of Lavender Diamond, was wearing a Seventies’ high-waisted purple
robe while talking to a mustachioed artist adorning a barbershop quartet hat
and a purple velvet bow-tie. Lukacs herself wore a Twenties’ flapper dress with
a feather headpiece and Indian bell anklets.
“I personally feel
very connected with the energy of the Roaring Twenties and all the real
craziness that was going on during prohibition,” she told me. “Flappers are the
true punks!”
“I can see how some
people would view the way that we look and the art that we are making as
attributed to another era,” she added. “But I really feel like we are tuning
into a tangible thing that is happening right now in 2008. I think we are
creating our own culture and we have so many new tools to make our own
revolution on our own terms.”
Blakeslee
brought out Lukacs’ cake with candles. She took out a butcher knife and started
cutting slices for everyone. A girl was painting my eyes with green glitter and
makeup when Lukacs suddenly grabbed a handful of cake and smeared it in her
face. The girl shrieked with laughter and retaliated by grabbing the entire
cake and dumping it on her head. A massive cake fight erupted and within seconds
everyone in the kitchen was covered in chocolate.
Icing still dripping
from her forehead, Lukacs offered to show me the house with Blakeslee.
“Check out this epic
chandelier,” she said. “It definitely has a mind of its own. The lights will
dim at random moments when there are spirits present.”
The living room was
decorated with psychedelic collages, Tibetan prayer flags, and various other
intriguing objects such as a sculpture that looked like a birdcage torture
chamber, an old piano with broken keys and a jukebox from 1969 that played
45’s.
“Look what Alia Penner made me for my
birthday,” she said holding up two framed artworks. “They’re paintings of
spirit animals. Here’s a frog and this is a deer. Deer are the animals that I
associate with the most. They sometimes like to come visit us at the house.
It’s wild around here with all the trees and animals and shade and birds!”
“Laurel Canyon has a physical energy that
comes from the place itself,” said Blakeslee.
“It is a ponderous, thoughtful vibe, because this is a vortex where time opens
up a little bit and things feel lighter and slower, with more space to think
and dream than any other place I’ve lived. Our house feels inside like a living
time capsule with energies and articles from the past, the present and even the
future.”
“The Laurel Canyon vibe is real,” agreed Lukacs.
“It’s reflected in all the famous albums that were written and recorded here.
It feels great to connect with that and picture David Crosby in a black cape
cruising down the canyon. Or all the Zappa parties! Or Jim Morrison living behind the Canyon
Country Store! The canyon is the only
reason we are living in LA. Our house is kind of the Rec Center for our circle
of friends. Our door is always open and I guess that is the key. It’s a place
that keeps a community of friends together. It really feels like we are taking
the canyon back.”
***
While Laurel Canyon was experiencing this revival, another historic canyon
was witnessing a resurgence thanks to the presence of folk rocker Devendra
Banhart. In 2006, he and his producer Noah Georgeson moved to the bohemian enclave of Topanga Canyon to
make a new record together. Their home soon became a magnet for artists,
musicians and friends who would escape from the hustle of LA to enjoy the
peaceful atmosphere.
Back in the Sixties, when Los Angeles was growing into a major
music capital, Topanga
became the home of many performers, including Joni Mitchell, Steven Stills,
Mick Fleetwood and Van Morrison. In many respects, Topanga carries much of the same history as Laurel.
Yet, because it is a lot more isolated than Laurel, Topanga still retains today
its hippie vibe. Flanked
with rolling hills, and minutes away from the Pacific Ocean, second-hand stores
along dirt paths sell tie-dye t-shirts next to old huts and shops that offer
anything from pilates classes to vegan food.
The first time I
discovered Topanga was also the first time I met Devendra Banhart. LA wonder
child Adarsha Benjamin had asked me to write an article about him for an online
magazine she was starting called Audio Video Disco.
Benjamin, twenty-one,
was the embodiment of the hippiester. Always vibrant, free and full of love,
she belonged to that rare breed of person whose charisma could inspire a whole
way of life.
She told me about her
upbringing on our way to Banhart’s house.
Her parents had been adept followers of the Indian guru Osho who was one
of the most renowned as well as the most controversial spiritual leaders of his
times.
“My dad was with Osho
since the Seventies,” she told me, “when he first traveled to India at
eighteen. My mom later became a part of it in the Eighties. As a baby my
parents and all their friends would go to Osho’s ashram in India or stay on
Osho’s ranch in Oregon for workshops and camping. They wore red and orange
because those colors represented the highest form of spiritual dedication.
Everyone was mostly half-naked, smoking ganja and focusing on his or her
spiritual path. The meditations Osho taught
were about letting go of your conditioning, so I was never taught to be
anything other than free… and wild.
“Osho encouraged
sexual experimentation as part of spiritual practice and became known as the
Sex Guru. I know there was an incredible amount of sex happening on the ranch
and in the ashram back in the day. People really felt it was a road to more
enlightenment or something. I saw the effects of this as my parents both had
numerous boyfriends and girlfriends. I actually never knew parents were
supposed to be together. Then again, maybe it was something like our group of
friends now, very open, very loving, very incestuous. Hmm?”
As she said this, we
drove past a beautiful solar powered home in Topanga’s picturesque mountains.
“You see that house?”
asked Benjamin. “I just did an ayuascha ceremony there a few months
ago.”
“What
was it like?” I asked. I knew little
about ayuascha except that it was a powerful psychoactive plant used by shamans
of the Amazon.
“It was unbelievable,” she said. “The ceremony
began when the sun went down and we had been fasting all day to be clear for
the medicine. A Brazilian shaman called each person up, one by one, and he
created a concoction of dark, tar-like substance with ayuascha and some other
herbs that might be good for you. I drank the drink and he sat there with me
and said his prayers.
“As I started to trip,
the experience became very, very different to anything I had ever experienced.
The hidden depths of your soul are seriously revealed and I was curling up and
crying and I wanted to escape but there was nowhere to go. Ayuascha wants to take you deep and you will
want to fight it, but it’s there and it’s like looking at your organs in a
mirror. Some people were moaning, crying, screaming, laughing the whole night.
I cried and laughed too, just not as intensely as others that were healing some
major traumas and issues. At the darkest moments, this beautiful love and light
would fill my heart and I would accept and surrender and then it would be
bright and happy again.”
***
By the time Benjamin
finished describing her experience, we arrived to the Topanga Seed and Feed.
Our friend and photographer Ashley Haber, who took all the photos for this
article, was waiting for us in his Seventies’ RV. Emily Kokal, the lead singer of Warpaint, was
there with him in the beige, orange and brown mobile home known in Los Angeles
as the War Pony.
Haber lived in the RV
but, because of Los Angeles street regulations, he had to move it every three
days. The War Pony soon became the
hippiester headquarters. Haber would get
at the wheel and drive anywhere, parties, summer festivals, beaches and
deserts, with a traveling circus of half-naked boys and girls tripping on life
and love, if nothing else. As the War
Pony cruised along California’s roads and landscapes, hippiesters in makeup and
costume would sing, kiss and fuck in the most uninhibited display of fun and
debauchery.
At the moment, the War
Pony was parked outside the Topanga Seed and Feed. Haber was looking with inscrutable eyes at
the wind chimes, birdhouses and garden gnomes that were for sell. He lifted his
camera and -- click! -- immortalized the moment. Emily Kokal followed him out
of the RV wearing butterfly wings and drinking water from a plastic bottle with
a crystal at the bottom.
Adarsha Benjamin knew where Banhart and Georgeson lived
so she led us up a broken dusty road to a two-story wooden house surrounded by lush vegetation. The home was only an earshot from where Neil Young had recorded After The Gold Rush. The house seemed
empty but after knocking a few times we heard a voice shout, “Come upstairs!”
We followed the
staircase up to a little office on
the second floor where Banhart was drawing. He jumped up from his desk and
greeted us with a warm hug. “It’s so wonderful of you guys to come,” he said
smiling. “I’m really happy you’re here.”
Banhart stood shoeless and shirtless with his thin torso
and arms sprinkled with indescribable tattoos.
Rings made of silver, turquoise, and amber ornamented each of his
fingers and a communist ushanka adorned his head. The flaps of the brown furry
hat were tied to the crown, revealing that a strand of long dark hair was
wrapped around his forehead like a turban while the rest of his mane flowed
freely on his shoulders.
“What do you think of the place?” he
asked. “Twelve people lived here at one point. There
were beds everywhere, couches, tents, hammocks and we even had a circus tent in
the back.”
Banhart wrote his songs and created his artworks in a tribal décor made of batiks,
Persian rugs, old African masks, and Native-American artifacts. Several of his
drawings and poems were now pinned to the wall next to photographs of his
bandmates. He only needed to
take a few steps from his office to enter a room full of
exotic-looking instruments and vintage recording equipment with a panoramic
view of the canyon. This was where
he had installed his studio and recorded the underestimated album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.
Surrounded by a serene landscape of trees and greenery, Banhart could focus
completely on his craft. His library was stacked with obscure records
and piles of brown-paged books with titles like The Zuni Man-Woman, Black Elk
Speaks, and Lame Deer: Seeker of
Visions. The latter now sat on his desk and had inspired a tattoo on one of
his hands.
Banhart caught me
peeking at his library and grabbed an old paperback. “Have you heard of Mulata?” he asked. “It’s by the
Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias. This is my favorite book of all time.
It’s out of print, even though he got the Nobel Prize. Just borrow it and you
can return it.” He then paused before adding, “Actually you know what, just
take it. The best thing about having material things is that you can give them
away.”
This simple act really
touched me. I would never, ever, under any circumstance, give my favorite book
away, especially if it was out of print. I’ll admit that the generosity of his
gesture was perhaps increased by the fact that, with his soft eyes and his long
dark hair and beard, Banhart looked exactly like Jesus. As an atheist, I don’t
even believe in the divinity of Jesus but, like everyone in America, I have
seen hundreds upon thousands of images of Him in my life and the resemblance
subliminally conferred Banhart a God-like status. Just as the McDonald’s golden
arches immediately make you want to eat a burger (or hurl, depending), so do
Banhart’s soft eyes, long hair and beard make you feel like you’re in the
presence of the Lord. It’s the result of efficient marketing by the industry of
God.
“Adarsha, where’d you
get your name?” asked Banhart. “It’s Indian right?”
“Yes, it’s Sanskrit,”
she confirmed. “It means ‘first light of
the new moon’ but in Hindi it is a principle or something worthy to be
followed. My parents read the name in an Osho book. What about your name?”
“My parents’ guru
Maharaji Prem Rawat gave it to me. It’s
Sanskrit for ‘king of gods.’ I actually just found this anti-Maharaji
propaganda film on the internet called Lord
of the Universe! He started addressing audiences in India when he was only
three and came to the USA for the first time at thirteen. It was the Seventies and thousands of people
came from all over the country to see him. People put a lot of faith in gurus
back then and he had all these followers who believed that he was a god. But it
wasn’t like he was gonna touch their third eye and suddenly Shiva was gonna
appear and make them enlightened.”
“The only guru is
yourself,” said Benjamin. “The guru within. These days I think having faith in
others becomes commercialism. It’s not the Sixties anymore when information was
hard to come by and traveling half way around the world was the answer to some
spiritual fulfillment you were looking for.
Nowadays, these truths, these answers, these gurus, are in every book
shop, cafe and yoga studio across the world.”
***
Banhart suggested we hang out in his bedroom where a queen-size
mattress ate two thirds of the space. We all crowded on the bed and he pointed
to a gong that hung to the wall by a
string shaped like a five-pointed star. “You see, it’s a penta-gong,” he joked.
“Or a gong-agram, you name it.” Banhart combined an endearing self-deprecating sense of humor with an
astounding knowledge of, well, everything. The average conversation went as
easily from the topic of astral projection to the peyote rituals of the Huichol
Indians, from the graphic novels of Alan Moore to the best song by Chumbawamba. He was a true encyclopedia of esoterica, as versed in high culture as low
culture, media culture as occult culture, American culture as world culture.
Banhart took out a copy of his new record and showed us the artwork he
designed for the front cover, in which a formless pink egg spurted bizarre
shapes.
“It’s supposed to be a messenger, maybe of Mother Earth or God, shooting
out thunderbolts of energy at nothingness,” he said. “This is the stage when
matter is pre-formation, pre-crystalization. You can kind of make out a
seaweed, or a fucking plant, something right, but it isn't fully formed yet. So
this is that creation being shot out.”
He then showed us the back cover to reveal what looked like a valley.
“Masculine and feminine,” observed Kokal.
Banhart’s jaw dropped.
“Exactly!” he said. “So when the cover is closed, the two are
together besides each other. Masculine and feminine are united.”
Banhart believed that
he first became a musician when he discovered as a child the possibility of
crossing from the masculine into the feminine.
“When I was twelve
years old,” he said, “I put on one of my mother’s dresses and started to sing.
That’s the first time I realized I had a voice.”
This episode was
actually related in the first song of Cripple
Crow, “Now That I Know”: “Twelve years old/ In your mama's clothes/ Shut
the blinds and lock up every door// And if you hear/ Someone's coming near/
Just close your eyes and make them disappear now// Years away/ Finds me here
today/ On my own and always on my way now.”
Several of the songs
on Smokey Hills were told from the
point of view of a woman. By traveling from masculine to feminine, Banhart
discovered the possibility of overcoming the constricting laws and taboos of
society and expanding his consciousness.
Banhart not only
explored the subjectivity of women, but also of other cultures. As he went from solo artist to group
collaborator, his sound evolved from an experimental version of American folk
to a jabberwocky of world music. And with each new style came the lyrical
exploration of another cultural consciousness.
Banhart not only
challenged phallocentrism and ethnocentrism but also anthropocentrism. In his world, animals and plants carried the
same importance as humans. This openness
allowed him to learn from something as simple as a spider in the song “Little
Yellow Spider” on the album Black Babies:
“Little yellow spider, laughing at the snow/ Well maybe that spider knows
something that I don't know/ 'Cause I'm goddamn cold.”
Devendra made a very
touching statement by observing that if a little insect could stand the snow
while a big human is freezing in it, there must be more to that creature than meets
the eye.
Banhart
was always singing about fauna and flora in a seemingly naïve way that reminded
me of an anecdote I read in a book by Derrick Jensen called Thought to Exist in the Wild. Jensen
criticized Western culture’s belief that humans were superior and more
intelligent than animals. He told the story of a Native American spiritual
leader who was chanting in a circle with several environmentalists when one of
them started to pray, “Please save the spotted owl, the river otter, the
peregrine falcon.” The Native American got up from this dorkfest and whispered
to the environmentalist, “What are you doing, friend?”
“I’m
praying for the animals,” he replied.
“Don’t
pray for the animals. Pray to the animals,” said the Native
American. “You’re so arrogant. You think you’re bigger than they are, right?
Don’t pray for the redwood. Pray that you can become as courageous as a
redwood. Ask the redwood what it wants.”
With
the awe and respect Banhart showed animals, he could not be accused of
practicing this interspecies version of white man’s burden. In his spiritual
quest, he was always reinvestigating what many would consider less developed
forms of consciousness.
As he sang in one of
the most popular songs of his album Cripple
Crow “I Feel Just Like A Child”: “See I was born thinking under the sky/
Didn’t belong to a couple of old white guys// From sucking on my mother’s
breast/ To when they lay my tomb to rest/ I’m a child yeah.”
Banhart distinguished
himself from “old white guys” by exploring the subjectivity of children,
animals, plants, women and member of other cultures. In the manner of a shaman, he overcame all
the barriers of consciousness to celebrate life.
***
I noticed a photo of
the famous Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso lying on Banhart’s bedside
table. “He’s my hero,” said Banhart. In the Sixties, Caetano Veloso became the
leader of a movement called Tropicalismo
that combined traditional Brazilian genres of music with international
influences to create a unique new sound.
The doctrine of
Tropicalismo came from the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s famous Manifesto Antropófago,
the Cannibal Manifesto. This incredibly important text published in 1928 sought
to address the question of Brazilian identity in a country struggling to make
the transition to modernity amidst a melting pot of American, European and
African cultures.
Andrade encouraged
Brazil to keep up with modernity in a way that allowed the country to cut loose
from its colonized roots and in particular from the condescending belief that
the native Brazilians were inferior to their Eurpean conquerors. He
suggested Brazilians should learn from the indigenous Tupi people, who were
cannibals, and devour the best elements of the foreign
vanguards to make them their own.
The
concept of cannibalism became the cornerstone of Tropicalismo, as artists such
as Veloso sought to address the growing popularity of Anglo-Saxon music by
swallowing it within Brazilian culture. “The idea of cultural cannibalism fit tropicalistas like a glove,” explains
Caetano Veloso in his biography Tropical
Truth. “We were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Tropicalismo aimed to ‘cannibalize’ the beauty and richness of
Brazil’s folk songs while assimilating the most original elements of
Anglo-American pop music.”
With
globalization turning the planet into a giant food court,
Banhart followed the lead of the tropicalistas
to feast on a smorgasbord of world cuisine. His new album featured many new
styles including dancehall, samba, Motown and rock. It seemed to me like he
was embracing a concept that celebrated ingurgitating other musical forms to
further expand his consciousness. And as such he embodied the twin faces of the
Hippiester’s Janus: the Shaman and the Cannibal.
The Shaman and the
Cannibal are the new heroes of an era when beliefs have fallen from their
monolithic pedestal and opened to multiplicity. In an America that has lost
faith in its ideals, they represent two sides of the same coin. The former
roams the Earth to experiment with the spiritual, the mind and the content; the
latter experiments with the material, the body and the form. Neither believe in
the supremacy of any set of cultural values and both seek to expand their
cultural horizons. Where the Shaman
channels the ghost, the Cannibal eats the shell.
***
Several months after going to see Banhart in Topanga, I ran into
photographer Lauren Dukoff who misleadingly introduced herself as his sister.
This was not so far from the truth since she had met him and the lead singer of
Hecuba Isabelle Albuquerque in high-school. The two eagerly took her
under their wing even though she was two years behind them. She brought her
camera during all of their adventures and, as a result, became one of the earliest documentarians of their scene.
“When you look at Topanga in the Sixties,” Dukoff told me, “it’s just a
moment in time and the same is going on today. People will label it a movement
but the real common thread is that there is a community and family and
friendship and collaboration. And that’s what people respond to. When you have
a group of eclectic musicians who point at each other and say, ‘Hey, look at
what all these amazing guys are doing,’ that’s what becomes the connective
thread.
“The community of artists house was definitely Devendra’s Topanga home.
That house was such a beautiful place to be creative. It was like a magnet for artists wanting to
seek refuge. Everybody stayed there and fucked there. The door was always open.
You would go for lunch and end up spending the whole weekend. It was a real
interesting part of an LA moment that I don’t think you could find anywhere
else.”
***
With the reawakening of the Laurel and Topanga scenes, hippiesters started
popping up all over the place. I couldn’t go anywhere without running into
meadows and trees and Mexican rugs and huichol masks and ponchos and beards and
long hair and head scarves and kundalini yoga and tarot decks and folk music
and tribal electro and mind-altering drugs and orgies. People who had been
prancing around in moonboots with neon spandex leotards were now growing their
hair and eating vegan.
A similar change was occurring in Brooklyn, where fantastic bands like
Yeasayer and MGMT helped popularize a sound and image rooted in Sixties’
psychedelia. The interesting thing was that this was happening outside of the
historical and geographical influence of Laurel and Topanga.
I called Anand Wilder, one of the members of Yeasayer and a college buddy
of mine, to get his insider’s perspective on the whole issue. On top of being
an outstanding musician, he is the person I credit for bringing back the mullet
in the early naughts. I say this as a compliment. He foresaw the ironic haircut
years before it became trendy. Yet, like Alex Ebert, he had now moved from the
hipster style to a neo-Sixties look. He sported beautiful wavy Jesus hair and
wore flowing ethnic tunics. He was for all intents and purposes the perfect
person to ask if his style and music were at all influenced by Laurel Canyon.
Wilder had even played music with Guy Blakeslee when both were in high-school
together in Baltimore.
“I don't really feel comfortable describing Laurel Canyon,”
he told me. “It’s a scene I have no connection to. Yeasayer was never part of a
scene; we worked on our album in a total bubble. We demoed and recorded our
songs in our practice space and basement in Baltimore. We were only labeled as
a part of a scene by music bloggers itching for an easy story. Once our album
was released, the image of who we were was mostly out of our hands. We did have
a few friends who also live in Brooklyn who play in some of the best bands out
there right now, Suckers, Quinn Walker, Chairlift, MGMT, but anyone else that
we're grouped with we've only met after touring.”
It therefore seemed
like the bands emerging out of Brooklyn didn’t necessarily have a connection to
Laurel or Topanga Canyon. If there was any kind of commonality it went beyond
the tags and labels that critics imposed on them and pointed to what Lauren
Dukoff described as an outburst of creative energy within a talented group of
like-minded people.
Trendsetters like
Wilder and Ebert who helped give rise to the hipster phenomenon could no longer
turn to it to define themselves in an inventive way. People tend to dismiss the
fact that the hipster phenomenon had its significance. It blossomed in the
early naughts at a time when the youth was being spoon-fed with so much
manufactured crap, from boy bands to reality TV and the war in Iraq, that
wearing a “World’s Best Mom” t-shirt with pink leotards and a handlebar
mustache seemed like a form of transgression.
It was a transgression
that was neither angry nor violent but fun –a lampooning of American trash
through its mock celebration. Many would say that this was its limit, that it
was apolitical and media driven, yet such was the postmodern world that an
entire generation was born into. Of course, like everything else, hipsterdom
soon became codified, packaged and marketable. Once it turned predictable, the
fun and irony were lost.
Now that hipster
media-culture-referentiality has run its course, the creative fringe is facing
the challenge of finding influences outside of postmodern civilization. Hence,
the hippiester’s renewed interest in nature, pre-industrial values, world
music, Eastern philosophy, native religion, ethnic fashion and Sixties’
counterculture.
This new movement is
forcing young people to look beyond the media-saturated world they grew up in
to an era that sought for non-materialistic spiritual fulfillment. It is an
interesting case of a trend pushing people away from their TVs and into
themselves. Proof that fashion can be spiritual, ha! Naturally, this kind of
paradigm shift is blossoming in semi-rural areas such as Topanga and Laurel but
can even touch urban areas like Brooklyn and, soon, the rest of America.
***
The media completely missed the mark by
labeling the first wave of this spiritual renaissance with demeaning names such
as “Freak Folk,” “Psych Folk” or “New Weird America.” These terms reduced the
burgeoning phenomenon to a bizarre fad and failed to recognize its depth and
range of artistic experimentation. Particularly infuriating was the tendency to
pigeonhole it to a mere derivative of the hippie counter-culture.
“In my own art and
music and fashion and everything, I really try to be true to myself rather than
imitate something that came before,” Blakeslee told me --
and he could be speaking for all hippiesters. “So without
making ‘retro music’ or looking like a person from another decade, I try to
take the things I like from all cultures and time periods and religions and
philosophies, but it is most important to be resonant with the world of NOW.”
And there lies the heart and soul of the
hippiester phenomenon.
“I have
thought a lot about what connects the musicians in our scene,” Isabelle Albuquerque
of Hecuba told me. “It’s not about a bunch of people making the same style of
music. As far as I can tell, it’s some kind of spirit that’s similar but it’s
really hard for us to draw a circle around it.” Just in Los Angeles it would be
practically impossible to unite the bands in the hippiester scene beyond the
fact that they play together and circulate in the same group of friends.
Hecuba, Devendra Banhart, Warpaint,
Edward Sharpe, The Entrance Band, Lavender Diamond, Noah Georgeson, Lucky
Dragons, Lions of Pangeer, We Are The World, Fool’s Gold, Jonathan Wilson,
Rainbow Arabia, these LA-based artists are universes apart, whether it be their
musical influences or their stage performances. Their sound ranges from folk to
rock to tribal to electro and their acts involve anything from imagining a
Middle-Eastern cabaret, to bringing life-size Day-Glo cardboard cut-outs of
animals on stage and creating instruments that respond to body contact.
“What brings them together is more of a
mentality than a style,” Isabelle Albuquerque told me. “They are completely
liberated in the way they express themselves with their music.”
As Blakeslee revealed,
the horizons of the hippiester opened to include all cultures
and time periods and religions and philosophies.
East, West, North,
South, ancient, modern, postmodern, premodern, high-tech, low-tech, indie, pop,
urban, rural, high-brow, low-brow, young, old, rational, mythical, magical,
mystical, national, tropical, animal, human, masculine, feminine, cowboy,
Indian, astronaut, robot, Twenties, Sixties, Seventies, and Allties.
Now everything is fair
game.
***
This radical freedom, this cultural awareness,
this spiritual revival is what carried our bus to Marfa.
“As long as I can remember,”
said Ebert, “I was always trying to break the rules. That was the legacy of
rock and roll. It was about transgression for the sake of transgression.
Finally this generation is channeling its energy towards more positive things.
We’re trading self-destruction for self-realization. We want to become realized
and we want you to become realized.”
Ebert had gotten a
deck of fifty-two cards and was practicing his ESP powers with his bandmates by
testing their capacity to telepathically guess which card he was holding in his
hand. Obviously I could see how guessing cards would easily become a
self-fulfilling prophecy but Ebert was taking the experience further, and
deeper.
“I am trying to learn
about magic,” he explained. “If you concentrate well enough you will know what
card the other person is holding. I feel like if I develop my magical powers
then I can help others. You know we’ve
been doing a lot of research about spirituality and it
has TOTALLY affected our life and so our music. I’ve learned that what you
focus on you become, produce, contribute to. I have felt first hand the
negative effects of this notion, so it has helped to shape a certain awareness
and care in choosing the words of our songs. Words are magic, they effect
change, form. That’s why we want to be singing things that we want to become,
to experience, and want others to experience. ”
***
Ashley
Haber was at the wheel to give Corn-Fed a rest.
The bus posed no challenge to the commander of the War Pony. He had
purchased an eighty hour energy spray, or “Trucker Spray,” and was driving like
speed racer. We raced past the slums of El Paso and finally arrived in Marfa
after a twenty-hour ride.
The
outskirts of town looked like a poor suburban neighborhood except that where
one would expect beautifully manicured front yards was just grey dust. Grey
dust and rusty bicycle wheels and old guns and kitsch sculptures of the virgin
Mary and tumbleweeds-a-tumblin. And cop cars. Tons of them. Marfa was right off
the Mexican border and you’d think from the ratio of house to cop car that the
majority of residents worked for the border patrol. There were also cowboys,
real ones, that toiled on the many surrounding ranches. They walked around in
cowboy hats, and could be distinguished from regular Texans from their bowlegs
and worn-in
jeans and boots.
We pulled over besides retired military
barracks and were informed that we had reached our destination. A whole wing of
the building was converted into a gallery space where we hung our artworks
while a stage was set up front. We
barely had time to change before being told that we were expected at the
festival’s opening event, a screening of There
Will Be Blood on the actual set of the movie.
We
jumped back onto our beloved bus and drove along the dirt road of a private
ranch until we arrived at what looked like a turn-of-the-century ghost town --
Paul Thomas Anderson’s bleak and minimalist recreation of a black gold estate.
The village, church and oil drill were still looming in the middle of the
desert with an inflatable screen standing at the center.
Local
Marfans sat around the screen in a half moon. Many of them were going to see
the film for the first time since the nearest movie theater was about fifty
miles away. A young man in overalls who was running for city council was
serving popcorn. I was told that he was trying to sway swing voters.
Once
the film was over, we headed back to our barracks for Edward Sharpe’s show.
This was the moment we had all been waiting for, the reason why we had made this
journey in the first place. A crowd assembled around the outside stage and
waited in anticipation as every single instrument was sound checked.
Ebert
finally began to sing while his enormous band of gypsies backed him with a
marvelous explosion of sound and love.
It
was monumental –it was epic –it was cut after four songs.
***
Apparently, the band was disrupting the sleep of… well I didn’t get to the end of the full explanation because someone had given me LSD and a healthy dose of mushrooms about 30 minutes before and it was starting to kick in. I headed to an abandoned school with a few other freaks wrapped like buritos in warm multicolored tribal blankets. We were on a mission to explore the meaning of life.
Ashley
Haber the King Freak was leading the pack with a handheld megaphone from which
he amplified insanities into the nothingness beyond.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE ARE MOMENTS AWAY
FROM DEPARTURE. PLEASE ATTACH YOUR SEATBELTS AND GET READY FOR TAKEOFF. YOU ARE
ABOUT TO TAKE A TRIP INTO THE PSYCHEDELIC MIND!!!”
He
then unleashed a demonic police siren built into the megaphone -- WEEEEEEEEEEEEEWOOOOOOO!!!
The
Baby Freaks spread open the wings of their blankets and ran as fast as they
could through the strong winds. They rode the vibrations of the siren and
launched into space.
SWOOOOOSH!!!
Off into infinity!
The
megaphone crackled -- KRRRRSHHH!!!! – before another mad non-sequitur attacked
the silence of Marfa.
“DON’T
THINK YOU’RE GONNA START MAKING SENSE YOU HAIRLESS MONKEYS!!!”
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEWOOOOOOO!!!
SWOOOOOSH!!!
KRRRRSHHH!!!!
“I
THINK IT’S TIME FOR MORE DICKEY!!! CAN SOMEONE PUT SOME WARM DICKEY IN MY
MOUTH???”
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEWOOOOOOO!!!
SWOOOOOSH!!!
KRRRRSHHH!!!!
“YOU
KNOW HOW YOU GOT HERE BUT DO YOU KNOW THERE’S NO WAY BACK???”
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEWOOOOOOO!!!
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEWOOOOOOO!!!
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEWOOOOOOO!!!
SWOOOOOSH!!!
SWOOOOOSH!!! SWOOOOOSH!!!
By
this point the Freak Family’s Faces were melting into a kaleidoscope of
fluorescent colors. Punk Pink! Yelling Yellow! Techno Teal! All colors of the
teletubbies sprayed out of the eyes and ears and nose of giant praying mantises
vomiting alien fluid.
SWOOOOOSH!!!
SWOOOOOSH!!! SWOOOOOSH!!!
A
colony of blanket burritos made its way to the center of the abandoned school
by expanding and contracting like slugs. We slowly climbed on top of each
other, conjoining our warm bodies and demented minds in the cold desert night.
I looked up through the collapsed ceiling and saw that stars were dancing a
ballet for me when they reshaped into an eagle. My spirit animal constellation
dove down and swooped me in its talons before taking me for a ride through the
universe.
Suddenly
two threatening headlights pierced through the night.
A car
pulled up.
A
door opened.
A
voice shouted out.
“Are
you guys trying to get arrested?”
Silence.
A
dark shadow with a cowboy hat danced through the headlights. Footsteps crunched
the desert sand.
“You
better keep quiet or the police is gonna come!”
Our
survival instincts took over.
Fast!
Hide from the shadow and light monster!
I covered
my head in my old quilt blanket and made myself become invisible. The others
followed my lead and wrapped themselves in their invisibility cloaks. Thus
concealed from the outside world, we waited for a long minute of silence.
“You
guys are a real peace of work, you know that?”
More
silence.
“Alright.”
Footsteps
crunched sand. The door closed. The car drove off.
Silence
and darkness.
Victory!
***
The
next day we decided to go for a walk around town. We soon got a real feel for
the unique
and unspoiled charm of Marfa. With its main street, train tracks and
courthouse, it looked pretty much like the same Texas small-town it was fifty
years ago. Yet, if this was the “real” America, as portrayed in the movies
filmed here, then we were in for a surprise.
Ashley
Haber and I decided to cut through a fenced field to get to town. A Mexican
worker reprimanded us. He then invited us to his house for beers. His backyard
was home to a family of about ten peacocks that gracefully displayed their
iridescent green tails amidst heaps of rusty tools and mechanical equipment. I
wondered for a second if I was having an acid flashback but mused instead on
how there was more symbolism in this scene than a writer could hope to ask for.
We
then went to an art opening and ran into Maximilla Lukacs
as she came out of a Seventies limousine whose doors were
painted with a mural of cattle grazing at sunset with cowboys. Pretty much the
most stupendous arrival ever. A charming country-Western couple in its sixties
had met her in the street and offered to give her a ride to the gallery in the
eccentric custom car. Lukacs was in Marfa to
present the wonderful music video she had directed for The Entrance Band’s song
“Grim Reaper Blues.”
Lukacs
also told to me that she had just witnessed a game of
“chicken shit bingo.”
“There was this
massive crowd around a cage with a chicken in it,” she explained. “They put a
card with numbers underneath the cage and each time the chicken took a shit,
they called the number that it shat on. They were waiting for the chicken to
plop one down on four in a row so I guess they were feeding it get it to shit
faster. I really think it was just an excuse for them to get drunk and watch a
chicken shit.”
As she was describing
the technicalities of this sport, the
owner of the limo pulled out of his trunk milk bottles full of green homemade
booze and offered us some. I took a swig and almost burned my throat off.
“It’s
absinthe,” he told me. “I make it by infusing wormwood in moonshine.”
Several
drinks later, he and his wife kindly invited us to come hang out at their
trailer but I was so drunk by then that I swerve-walked back to the barracks
and passed out on an old mattress covered in dust.
***
The
next day, we caught the world premiere of Heath Ledger’s last music video. It
was projected on an inflatable screen in the highest golf in Texas. After the
premiere, we were told Edward Sharpe had been approached to play another show
in an illegal bar on the outskirts of town.
The
band was ecstatic.
You
can imagine how disappointed they had been after buying a bus and driving a
thousand miles to a small town in the middle of nowhere to have their show
cancelled after four songs. It turns out a policeman had pulled the plug on
their performance for no justifiable reason.
News
of the show spread fast in the small town. Edward Sharpe’s unjust treatment by
the powers-that-be had made them local celebrities and, by the time I reached
the venue, it was packed all the way out to the parking lot.
There were so many people inside that it was practically impossible to
distinguish the band from the audience. Marfans were drunk with anticipation
and as soon as Edward Sharpe began
to play they started dancing and singing at the top of their lungs.
Suddenly, the police
walked into the bar and told everyone to vacate the premises. They had
discovered the clandestine show and were squashing it.
Ebert took a good look
at the authorities and decided he was not going to let them cut him down one
more time. If the Texan sheriff wanted a Western stand-off, that’s what he was
gonna get.
Ebert turned to his
girlfriend and stared deep into her eyes.
“Jade,” he asked, “do
you remember that time we almost got arrested in Marfa?”
“I’ll never forget,”
she answered. “Will you?”
With the assurance
that she was behind him, he silenced the brouhaha of the crowd and asked on the
microphone, “Jail or Home?”
This was too much for
the cops. They immediately made their way to the stage.
Suddenly, the audience
started chanting in unison.
“JAIL!!!”
“JAIL!!!”
“JAIL!!!”
The police chief
stopped and took a look around. He realized at that moment that he would have
to arrest the entire bar to stop the band. He frowned at Ebert and resigned to
let the show go on.
The crowd exploded in
a frenzy of joy and the band finished at last what it had set out to do all
along.
“Hooooome!” sang Ebert
to a fanfare of trumpets, guitars and drums. “Hoooooo-o-o-ome! Home is whenever I’m with you!”
The entire crowd
chanted back as loud as it could.
“HOOOOOOME! HOOOOOO-O-O-OME! HOME IS WHENEVER I’M WITH YOU!!!!”
The victory brought
everyone’s spirits to a state of religious ecstasy. Edward
Sharpe sang songs about true love and revolution and dreams with a spiritual
energy that carried their music into the realm of mysticism. The
bar looked like it was about to collapse from the vibrations.
After the concert, the
organizer of the film festival went up to the band. “You all were a blessing to the festival, the
town, and to my life forever. That was one of the most amazing nights of my
life and from the words expressed to me by many others I believe it will stay
with all of us all forever. There was so much love in that room people were
crying. What you didn't see was that the police chief was standing in the back
entranced by you the whole time. You are always welcome back to the desert
anytime. The stars would love to see all
your eyes again. Thank you a thousand times. You brought light.”
From the reaction of
the authorities and the audience, I knew that Alex Ebert’s magical powers had
worked. The hippiesters had conquered small-town America.
We packed the bus with
our instruments and were escorted out of Marfa by the border patrol. “That show
has a place in our histories as one of the greatest in our lives,” Ebert told
me on the way back to LA. We looked out the window and soaked in the town,
desert and stars knowing that this was only the beginning of our journey.
written by Marco, photo's by Ash
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