Krassner was too hip for the gloom
Good grief – Wavy Gravy
On the night Paul Krassner died at 87 [July 21, 2019: “Long Live Lord & Atheist of Political Satire!”], some friends gathered in a Venice California backyard to joke & smoke & fuck around as obscenely as possible. In mourning celebration of a revolutionary life joyfully lived. We felt good grief.
Krassner’s cause was freedom: To happily express yours, by as many means you can find. Always feeding our heads with his wisdom, his radical thoughts, his brainwaves of new ideas were at least thirty-seconds ahead of everyone else’s. Ala Express Yourself by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band in 1970:
Toni Morrison once said laughter, “was a way of taking the reins in your own hands.” Krassner really took us on one outrageously fun, funny, fearless ride. As the world spun faster and faster, he said, “Not only are things accelerating. The rate of acceleration is also accelerating.”
So can we evolve fast as we can enough to bring the enormous change needed ASAP, as Krassner constantly challenged readers & audiences? Do we get him? ( Not that he ever played hard to get) Can we dig him, appreciate his 70 years of fighting censorship and wicked mocking of the upper asses?
Larry Hankin of San Francisco’s The Committee: “The satirist’s goal is to climb as high as you can into the tree of absurdity, in order to see the baboon of reality, exposing his rump above.”
I was too young to catch the original cream (curdled way too soon) of what went up & down during the Sixties countercultural movement. A time when “everything was everything” (Witchi-Tai-To, which I had on this very 45),
and everybody who was hip was with everybody else who was hip. In ’68, Krassner and the Youth International Party – Krass came up with the name “Yippie” – inspired political & cultural revolution at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And beyond: I was twelve, sitting on our Rumpus Room floor, watching the proceedings on TV. Suddenly, I turned to my dad, watching through his Detroit News:
“Dad, why are the cops beating those kids in the street?”
“I don’t know, son.”
Lesson: Question Authority! They don’t know everything!
The first time I ever saw Paul Krassner was in 1977 at the Village Gate. He was so kind to stick around to confab after his performance. Our talk continued for forty years. When I wrote articles for The Realist — published from 1958 to 2001 — Paul was creator, editor, & encourager-in-chief. Our only contract was a kind of compact where his hand reached from his heart to my hand coming from my heart. If Krassner’s somewhere playing at the big karmic card table, he will never cheat. He always played fair. His seminal satirical featured Paul’s “impolite interviews” with, among others, Kurt Vonnegut, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Tim Leary, Wavy Gravy, and Ken Kesey. Author & avatar, guru Ken Kee Zee had a great line, explaining why his Sixties shaker & groover contemporaries kept on keeping on: “Because anyone who has seen the vision of what can be, knows that he either has to do, what has to be done, in order to bring about what can be, or he is…fucking off.”
In 1979, Krassner and I, journalists in San Francisco, covered the SF Police Department’s “White Night riots.” People hit the streets, after Supervisor Dan White was sentenced to 5-7 years for murdering Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. SFPD hit the people. I was able to hightail an escape up Market Street, but back near City Hall a cop beat Paul into painful, permanent disfigurement that night.
On Paul’s 86thbirthday, I drove sensational singer/songwriter Suzy Williams, and her husband, media ecologist and organizer of all things countercultural, Gerry Fialka, on a pilgrimage to Desert Hot Springs, two hours east of L.A. We wanted to celebrate with our mentor and his wife, video pioneer Nancy Cain.
They were such an adorable, adoring couple and I loved them. They once explained why their thirty-year marriage worked: “Because you know the other person is going to be on your side.”
We brought a nine-buck Pavilions chocolate swirl cake (melted), and after blowing out the candles, Paul said: “You know, I heard that 86 is the new 85.” An observation guaranteed to get giggles whenever repeated: try it! Later on, he explained how he liked to smoke a joint while rolling a joint in order to, “enhance the experience.”
In 2012, I drove Paul in from Desert Hot Springs for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Convention. Krassner was on a panel about legalization — ah, the bad old days — and we did an interview in his hotel room for “Offramp,” a show hosted by John Rabe on public radio station KPCC.
Krassner tells stories about taking acid with Groucho Marx and smoking a joint (w/opium) at John & Yoko’s. [All Hail Marx & Lennon!] Yoko, who funded Paul’s free abortion referral service in the years before Roe v. Wade, is pulling brownies from the oven, and over in a circle, Lennon isn’t passing the bone. Paul asks him: “To bogart a joint: is that just an American expression, like Humphrey Bogart with the cigarette dangling from his lower lip?” And Lennon says (try this in Liverpudlian), “In England, if you remind someone to pass the joint, you lose your turn.”
It took three years, Paul said, to realize Lennon had been fucking with him.
Recently I took my twenty-something nephew to see the Woodstock documentary, showing for one night on the big screen, in celebration of the event’s 50th Anniversary. I wanted to give Benjamin a taste of the original cream of the whole thing, right? This director’s cut version added a coda: The names of those ’69-ers we loved who are now gone. Scrolling up a black wall that looked like the Vietnam Memorial came, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Pigpen, Keith Moon, John Entwhistle, Max Yasgur, Abbie Hoffman…
“Paul Krassner to the pantheon, please!”
Every copy of The Realist in its original form can be read here
Gerry Fialka’s innerviews with Paul
https://archive.org/details/PaulKrassner
