Living Through a Revolution

America. It was like living through a revolution. Machine-gun nests on the steps of the Capitol, massive anti-Vietnam marches on Washington, riot police in New York, students gunned down at Kent State, black power, Black Panthers, flower power, Woodstock,civil rights marches, the universities closed down by student radicals, and everywhere a sense that America, the empire state, was about to implode. But there was also a sense of incredible optimism, that we were involved in the making of a counterculture, and that even if the political revolution failed the cultural revolution would succeed.

Jane and I were living in uptown Manhattan, pitched between the white citadel of Columbia University and the black cyclotron of Harlem—the Demilitarised Zone, as the taxi drivers who refused to take us there called it. It didn’t seem too demilitarised to me. We had our four young children with us and were living in an old tenement block that Columbia University had tried to tear down to build a gym but which student protestors wanted to save because there were poor blacks living there. This had led to the Morningside Height riots. Some of the apartments had been trashed by Columbia, which ripped out all the plumbing and heating and other services; the building was three-quarters deserted, the corridors dark, rubbish-strewn and dangerous. We were staying, illegally, in an apartment that was officially rented by a Columbia academic who’d become sick of the violence and moved to upstate New York. When he had lived there he’d carried two wallets: one for the muggers and one for himself. Morningside Park, which fronted on to our apartment block, was nicknamed Muggers Alley.

We sent our children to PS 36-125, which was about 90 per cent black and Puerto Rican schoolkids. The week after they started a seven-year-old girl was raped in the school grounds. People got mugged regularly, some at knifepoint. A few months earlier a local storekeeper, an old lady, had her wrist broken in a hold-up. Then a boutique on 123rd Street, which the girls from nearby Barnard College go to, was held up at gunpoint. Our building was heavily armed; nearly every apartment had a gun of some sort. Another academic, Professor Victor Reed, a big guy from the South, had a shotgun, two rifles, a spring-, a chain, an iron-bar police lock and a steel sheet on the front door. There was a system of buzzing codes for the lobby and apartment doors, but sometimes guys raced across from the park and into the building before anyone could stop them. We avoided the lifts. You didn’t want to be trapped.

*

Several months earlier I’d been sitting on the front step of our terrace house in Sydney when the phone rang. It was someone from the Harkness Fellowship foundation, which offered 22-month fellowships to ‘outstanding Australians’ to live and study in the United States: would I be interested in applying? It was a risk. I agreed to apply. Telling them that I would be applying on behalf of myself, my wife, three young children and a fourth as yet unborn gave them some pause—though they said it was likely to be more of a problem for us than them. We had no idea what waited for us.

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
will not be able to lose yourself on scag
and skip out for beer during commercials.
The revolution will not be televised …
— Gil Scott-Heron

The revolution underway in the United States at the time was a black revolution, and a student revolution, a women’s revolution and a cultural revolution, an attempt by the American people to seize power for themselves. It was in that sense a revolution as broad as the 1789 French Revolution in its ambition, and as the French student uprising of 1968; but did it have the political energy and the organisational power to succeed in a nation where the political structure seemed frozen, beyond the democratic will of the people? As a Harkness fellow I was about to confront this almost every day I lived there. I became an outsider plunged into the tumult of a revolution-in-the-making. My family and I came to feel so involved in what was going on, and so committed to the United States and the idealism of the American way of life, that we reached breaking point. To an Australian wrapped up in the cottonwool compromises of Australian life, it was a profoundly revelatory time and it changed me forever. For two years we experienced the extremism of American life when the society itself was in a state of crisis: its violence, its moral grandeur, its racism, its incredible cultural energy, its optimism, its black-white-redneck-Hispanic-Southern-western-polyglot character, and the weird conflictual dynamic that was continually threatened to blow the place apart. ‘To live anywhere else is sort of cheating,’ Bruce Petty once remarked. It was in the United States that I felt that the future of the Western world was being decided.

*

At first we were simply delighted and excited to be in New York. ‘Have you ever lived in New York?’ the Australian actor Gordon Chater replied incredulously when an interviewer asked him why he chose to live there instead of Australia. I was studying American literature at New York University in Greenwich Village, having been persuaded by Lillian Roxon, an expatriate journalist and famous member of the Push, that ‘the Village’ was where it was at.

Roxon had become a New Yorker (‘if I thought I was going to live here forever I’d die, but if I thought I’d leave here for forever I’d die,’ she once told me); she was a formidable woman, solid like Bessie Smith, with a fantastic wit and a once-in-a lifetime talent for repartee, the put-down and the send-up, the come-on and the come-uppance; she was the undisputed queen of rock writers at the time but, like Oscar Wilde, what she wrote was but a pale imitation of what she said in bars and on the phone and to her admiring audience of rock stars, writers, artists and expatriates. I’d first got in contact with her when I was editing the left magazine Comment in Sydney and she agreed to become our New York correspondent; she wrote about foam sculptors and love-box makers and was the first to unearth Cynthia Plaster Caster, the groupie who made plaster casts of the penises of famous rock stars like Jimi Hendrix; that, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the East Side underground was her scene. She was a wild woman when she wanted to be and told me how she had achieved notoriety in Sydney by giving a public blow-job in the shower to Darcy Waters, the erstwhile leader of the Push; she denied it but she told the story with such glee I suspected it was true. Yet she was extremely vulnerable: she worried about her weight, her friends (when Germaine Greer came to New York to launch The Female Eunuch she was distressed when Germaine didn’t get in touch with her for a few days, but they made it up) and her severe, recurrent bouts of asthma—once she was reduced to ringing a doctor in Sydney when she couldn’t breathe and became desperate and nobody, nobody came. When I wrote a profile of her, a several months after I arrived in 1969, my editor at the New York Times said it sounded as though I was in love with her. I wasn’t.

Unlike Roxon I didn’t know where it was ‘at’ and cared less. I disliked the American obsession, with which I had already become familiar, with ‘making it’ and being seen to make it—much to Lillian’s chagrin, who took me to famous rock haunts like Max’s Kansas City where she’d introduce me as a brilliant Australian writer and watch me stumble as I tried to remember who Roger McGuinn was and asked when John Coltrane’s next gig was … talk about parvenu. But at least catching the E train each day or so to the Lower West Side, and sometimes Duke Ellington’s A train to the lower East Side, and then back again to Columbia University gave me an injection of the very different New York cultures that exist in Manhattan. But it was, ultimately, our neighbourhood that gave us most.

Our neighbourhood was a fringe zone: Columbia students, Jewish shopkeepers, working-class Irish, welfare residentials, Japanese, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, blacks from the projects. Grimy apartment blocks, iron fire escapes disfiguring the outside walls, pavement gutters choked with rubbish and snow-slush. Around there most of the crime was committed by blacks, and most of the victims were black people, who suffered the violence of The Man and men: murder, brutal attacks, rape, maiming. Except for muggings, which were mainly black against white: the ofays had more to offer.

Every few nights the police stood near Amsterdam Avenue and pulled drivers over to the kerb: gypsy (unauthorised) cab drivers, youths, carloads of Afros. Always black. Sometimes they were ordered out, stood up against the wall, and searched. One night, walking down past the projects, I noticed a silver Italian GT sports machine edging the gutter. I walked closer. It’s not often you see a Lamborghini in Harlem. A cop was leaning over it, checking the driver’s papers. More harassment. The cop was white, the driver black. As the cop walked away I glanced inside and realised it was Miles Davis.

‘Hi, Miles.’

Davis nodded.

‘I liked your last album, man.’ (It was Bitches Brew). Davis smiled warily.

A blip on the accelerator, and the car slid out into the traffic and up Amsterdam Avenue. This was only a few months after the time when, while taking a break on the pavement between sets at the Village Vanguard, the finest jazz trumpeter in the world was clubbed across the face with a policeman’s nightstick and thrown into jail. Even Lamborghinis didn’t make a fat black cat safe.

After a while we became very involved in the community and its culture. Our children made black friends. So did we. Some nice reversals occurred. Coming up the lift, one of our daughter’s friends, Angela, turned to her cousins and said: ‘See, I told you she was white!’ Her cousins, embarrassed, tried to hush her up. ‘It don’t matter about that, Angela, it’s what kinda person you are. People is people, it don’t count what colour y’all are.’ I was going to black jazz clubs in the east Village such as Slugs and listening, stunned, to the avant-garde jazz that was trying to hook a musical revolution onto the revolution that was going on in the streets—jazz, like the people, wanted to be free: Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Saunders … Jane and I also used to go to the Blues Night at the Apollo on 125th street to hear B B King, Bobby Bland and Big Mama Thornton, and to Fillmore East to hear Buddy Guy and the Allman Brothers. I used to tune in to the all-night jazz station and one night, driving through Harlem, I heard Albert Ayler’s ‘Message from Albert’. In its searing, violent runs and crescendos, its high-register use of harmonics and its painful voicing, it seemed the perfect metaphor for the anguish of black America.

We also made a lot of Jewish friends and we slowly came to realise that New York is dominated by Jewish culture: liberal, educated, highly political, media-savvy … and sometimes radical, like the Weathermen, who spun off from Students for a Democratic Society and later blew the fronts off town houses in Greenwich Village. Professor Reed and his wife, Marcy, once rescued us when we found ourselves, returning from a trip away, on upper Broadway in a slime-covered, cockroach-ridden welfare hotel with green and orange vomit in the communal bath down the corridor, the Spanish radio blasting in the room next door, smells of shit, death and despair. We pushed all the furniture up against the door and the wall; Jane stayed awake all night in case one of the children fell down the unboarded air shaft. They turned up next day in their Buick, took us in, found an untrashed apartment for us with WE WILL NOT MOVE blazoned across the ground floor.

We read the New York Times each morning and caught up with our friends the McCaugheys regularly. (Patrick, like me, was a Harkness scholar.) We wrapped up our youngest daughter like a Michelin baby—she had just started to walk—whenever the snowploughs failed and the street temperature fell below freezing. We slowly learned to live an expatriate life. How Jane managed it all I’ll never know, with four young kids and living in a strange environment on a low fellowship income. I helped as much as I could, though I was still at New York University; as usual the major domestic responsibility fell on her.

*

After five or six months of studying American literature, and writing virtually nothing, I wrote a long essay on the state of contemporary rock music as it seemed to me as an outsider, arguing it was at the start of the trajectory that jazz had performed in becoming a major art, but that it needed to amplify and reinforce its black cultural tradition. I decided to send it to the New York Times, without saying who I was or that I was an Australian or anything—and without much hope because I suspected that the Times probably was deluged with unsolicited stuff that they never read. But a week later I got a letter from Seymour Peck, the arts editor of the paper, saying that he liked my piece very much. If I agreed to shorten it he would like to publish it. I was delighted; the New York Times was, and still is, the most prestigious newspaper in the world and to get myself published in it at my first attempt was something.

Seymour Peck called me in and asked if I’d like to write anything else; I said I was listening to and thinking about jazz and blues and rock and trying to relate it to American culture, especially black culture, and I could try to write about that. Peck replied they already had a rock critic, Carly Simon, but that I could write for the Times on a freelance basis. So began my time of writing under the best editor I have ever known: a gentle, perceptive, responsive man, occasionally sardonic, who was cultural editor of the entire paper and had commissioned me to write essay-length features for it. One of the first was a profile of Kris Kristofferson, who was just beginning to emerge as a major country singer-songwriter, before he turned himself into a film actor. I also wrote profiles of Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, and Lillian Roxon, who was just finishing her Rock Encylopaedia (1969). When Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died within a few months of each other I wrote an essay called ‘The Rock & Roll Way of Death’, which drew a parallel between their deaths and those of great jazzmen such as Buddy Bolden, King Oliver and Charlie Parker. The experience of living in America, and confronting the terrible extremes of American life and American culture, had inspired me to try to reflect it in a very experimental, in-your-face, aggro style of prose that melded politics with music. When Peck asked me to review the Mayles Brothers’ documentary of the Rolling Stones’ tour of the United States and the concert at Altamont at which their Hells Angels security ran amok and a black guy in the audience was killed in front of them—to many commentators it signalled the end of the Woodstock generation—I tried to mix Professor John Anderson’s pluralism with my own anger and concluded:

Altamont wasn’t an accident. The rock culture’s long-standing flirtation with the Angels is just another facet of the we-are-one myth, the secular monism which preaches that everyone who is outside straight culture is the same. If ‘Gimme Shelter’ demonstrated anything it is that at Altamont there were two different and explosively opposed cultures—a fact which is dramatised in those climactic sequences in which Jagger, the arse-wiggling unisexual hero of new-found liberation, prances around the stage (‘I think Mick’s a joke, with all that fag dancing, I always did’: John Lennon) while a few inches away Hells Angels in insignia-splattered leather jackets and Herakles lionskins stare at him with disgust and contempt. The Angels are outsiders, sure, but their alienation is the only thing they have in common with the peace creeps who trod on their precious bikes (‘something which is your whole life,’ says Sonny Barger) or with the brave new wave of sexual freedmen which Flash Mick represents. Jagger’s right to do his thing: every gain in liberty, personal or social, is precious. But the Angels belong to a more brutal and repressive culture, one which has yet to be liberated, in which violence is the central motif: it is the only thing that gives their lives (working class ‘proles’, no future, a worse past, the discarded offal of the technocratic society) any meaning. Violence and hogs provide the power which a merciless system has stripped from them: and in their brutal reaction they enact, vicariously, the violent rebellion which the Woodstock Nation has so resolutely turned its back against. And so the Angels, like Jagger, become yet another surrogate:

The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or
Francis Scott Key nor sung by Glen Campbell,
Tom Jones, Johnny Cash or Engelbert Humperdinck.
The revolution will not be televised …

There is no counter-culture: there are many. There is no hero: everyone must be his own. There is no One: there are only ones, and it is only our differences which make the command ‘come together’ meaningful. We must beware of surrogates. We must beware of surrogate heroes like Jagger, whom we idolise because we have more sense than to idolise ourselves and not enough guts to make us worthy of idolatry; we must beware of surrogate violence because then those whom we vest it in will turn it, Angellicy, against ourselves; we must beware of surrogate prophets and doomsayers who lose heart and blow it secondhand to fulfil their own Jeremiads. Above all, we must beware of surrogate revolutions, the portable apocalypse of the rock festival and the mass freak-out—because what America, and the world, needs right now is the real thing.

God knows what Peck thought of my writing at the time; Hunter S Thompson was writing up a storm for Rolling Stone and what was to be called the New Journalism was getting under way, but I don’t think the New York Times had published any of this sort of politico/pop writing before. Shortly before we left the United States Peck paid me the immense compliment of inviting Jane and me to a farewell lunch with the senior editors of the Times. We discussed politics, and literature, and the possibility of my returning to the US to write permanently for the paper; but that would have meant me turning myself into an American—much as Robert Hughes and Patrick McCaughey finally did. I was still too much of an Australian to contemplate it.

Another feature I wrote for the New York Times was an essay extolling black funk music and accusing white artists of continuing to rip off black artists. A day or two later I was astonished to receive this letter in the post:

AMERICAN AIRLINES
In Flight … yes
Altitude: puzzled
Location: yes

Dear Craig McGregor

‘Money’, ‘Twist ‘n’ Shout, ‘You really got a hold on me’ etc were all numbers we (the Beatles) used to sing in the dancehalls around Britain, mainly Liverpool. It was only natural that we tried to do it as near to the record as we could—I always wished we could have done them yes closer to the original. We didn’t sing our own songs in the early days—they weren’t good enough—the one thing we always did was to make it known that there were black originals, we loved the music and wanted to spread it anyway we could. In the Fifties there were few people listening to blues—R & B—rock and roll, in America as well as Britain. People like Eric Burdon’s Animals, Mick’s Stones and us ate drank and slept the music, and also recorded it, many kids were turned on to black music by all of us.

It wasn’t a rip off It was a love in

John Lennon

P.S. What about the ‘B’ side of Money? P.P.S. even the black kids didn’t dig blues etc it wasn’t ‘sharp’ or something.

Only once in my time in America did revolution feel possible. It was the time Nixon, at the height of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia. Overnight, Columbia was plastered with spray-pak slogans: STRIKE! SHUT IT DOWN! STOP NIXON! The university was closed down by students; so were hundreds of others across the nation. Every night thousands of students marched through New York City. There was going to be a massive march on Washington. I decided to go, and drove through Greenwich Village in my old campervan plastered with anti-war posters and peace symbols; there were people in the streets everywhere, black and white, and at every intersection they waved to me, or raised their clenched fists, gave the peace sign; it was as though something unprecedented was about to happen. Images came to mind of Orwell, and Catalonia, and the Paris students’ near-revolution.

When we reached Washington the march went on for several hours, people packed fifteen and twenty abreast, an unending surge of humanity chanting, shouting, singing. Buses were piled two deep around the White House; inside, ranks of riot police armed with gas guns. Other riot police were lined up, line after line, facing the demonstrators. They suddenly formed up, raised their guns, and started firing. ‘DON’T RUN! DON’T RUN’ people were shouting. I was about to step off the pavement when the gas hit me. It was only the remnant of what was fired at the demonstrators earlier, but it was like walking into a chemical wall. I choked into a handkerchief, trying to walk on, but I was blind. I groped back towards the footpath. A student medic team—a Jewish guy and a woman in white coats—ran up and squirted medication into my eyes.

The woman next to me had big, drooping, liberated breasts. Some of the cops who were now relaxing, helmetless, behind squad cars started shouting at her. ‘Cow! Look at the fuckin’ cow! Look at it!’ The others swivelled around, laughing, jeering, shouting obscenities. I had a sudden understanding of the reality behind the confrontations, the weary war-and-peace games: the terrible social, sexual, racial hatred of people for each other. The United States was splitting apart like a ruptured orange. I’d felt frightened, and sick, and unutterably moved, but now I was angry. I slowed down, shouted back. One of the cops, a curly-haired redneck face above a tight collar, raised his rifle at me across the windshield.

President Nixon, faced with insurrection in the streets, hastily announced a time limit to the invasion of Cambodia. It’s part of his plan, he said, to end the war. The demonstrators went home, the campuses slowly reopened, Congress calmed down. And a few months later Nixon invaded Laos as well.

*

Not long before we were due to leave the United States I was strained and emotionally exhausted. I spent days lying on a mattress listening to the hiss of the steam radiator, unable to write. Jane got into our apartment-building lift with our three-year-old daughter Sarah and was suddenly confronted by a young black man holding something in a paper bag: a knife? He tried to grab her handbag. She resisted. He struggled with her, desperate to get the bag, keeping the lift door open. Finally he got the bag and ran across the street into Morningside Park. She gave chase, which was a foolish thing to do. As it happened police saw her running and drove down to the bottom of the park. When she got there the police had the young black guy face down on the pavement. He was on parole for another mugging—with a knife.

I walked across Columbia and noticed the statue of a woman in the centre of the campus with its face blown off. Lillian Roxon died in 1973 of an asthma attack. In 1980 John Lennon was gunned down outside his apartment in Manhattan. Three years earlier Sy Peck had died in a car smash on the Long Island Freeway. Fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives in the failed Vietnam War. Amerika, young people called it.

Was it all in vain? No. The political revolution failed but the cultural revolution succeeded. What happened in America in the sixties and seventies changed the world: the modern women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the environment movement, many of the alternative lifestyle movements—all had their origin in those times. The political superstructure of the United States remained frozen and remains so, unable or unwilling to respond to the great groundswells that began moving through American society at that time, but the idea that it would be possible to change people’s lives and transform the culture from within proved irresistible. The women’s movement, in all its diversity and psychic dynamism, is only one manifestation of the social power generated by what was optimistically called, in our time in America, the ‘revolution’—not only in people’s lives, but in people’s heads and hearts, and not only in America, and Australia, but throughout the world.

During our time in the United States I developed a tremendous admiration for Americans—especially those minorities who were trying to change the system from within. The idealism and capacity to persevere of those Americans who lived ‘in the heart of the beast’ and yet were prepared to risk their lives by standing up to it both heartened and frightened me. Every day in Harlem, on university campuses, in the South, and in communities right across the United States, Americans were called upon to display moral courage of an order Australians rarely have to enact. There was so much social energy there, so much striving and unfulfilled idealism, such a charge of undirected power coming from the people, that I felt it would eventually break through and transform the political order. The sense of intense commitment, of powerful grassroots movements, of open conflict and reordering, that whole dynamic of rapid social change was overwhelming. After a while the emotionalism and self-awareness of so many Americans, that typical mixture of maturity and naivety and upfront self-expression, seemed not just understandable but inevitable. What other response would you expect from a people living in the most powerful, most unjust, most confident, most multiracial, most dynamic empire state the modern world has known? I came away with a real respect for them. And, for a few friends (most of them Jewish, or black, or young), a complicated love. I still feel that.